The role of temporal attention in the processing of facial expression: Evidence from attentional blink paradigm

Fearful faces could be processed preferentially relative to neutral faces. However, it is still unclear whether the advantage of fear depends on temporal attentional resources. We used the “attentional blink” (AB) paradigm to investigate the role of temporal attention in the processing of fear. We manipulated the emotionality (fear, neutral) of the second target (T2), and T1-T2 interval time (lag 3, lag 8). Four experiments were designed to reduce gradually the available attentional resources for emotional T2 by manipulating the number of letters in the letter search task (Experiments 1 and 3) or in the letter working memory task (Experiment 2 and 4) in the T1 task. The results showed that the AB magnitude of fearful T2 was smaller than that of neutral T2, and this effect was not influenced by T1 difficulty in Experiment 1 (letter search task: 1, 2, 4, 6, and 8 letters) and Experiment 2 (letter working memory task: 1, 2, 3, and 4 letters), in which the T2 task was the intact face detection task. In Experiment 3, when the T2 was gender discrimination task, the AB magnitude of fearful T2 was smaller than that of neutral T2 in the low and medium T1- difficulty conditions (2 and 4 letters in the letter search task), but not in the high T1-difficulty condition (6 letters in the letter search task). Experiment 4 was a replication of Experiment 3, but with the working memory T1 task used in Experiment 2. As expected, the results of Experiment 4 replicated the results of Experiment 3 and provided more evidence that the processing advantage of fearful T2 was modulated by T1 difficulty. These results suggested that the priority of fear required attentional resources.