“Emotions Guide Us”: Behavioral and MEG correlates

Affectively salient stimuli are capable of capturing attentional resources which allow the brain to change the current course of action in order to respond to potentially advantageous or threatening stimuli. Here, we investigated the behavioral and cerebral impact of peripherally presented affective stimuli on the subsequent processing of foveal information. To this end, we recorded whole-head magnetoencephalograms from 12 participants while they made speeded responses to the direction of left- or right-oriented arrows that were presented foveally at fixation. Each arrow was preceded by a peripherally presented pair of pictures, one emotional (unpleasant or pleasant), and one neutral. Paired pictures were presented at 12° of eccentricity to the left and right of a central fixation cross. We observed that the participants responded more quickly when the orientation of the arrow was congruent with the location of the previously presented emotional scene. Results show that non-predictive emotional information in peripheral vision interferes with subsequent responses to foveally presented targets. Importantly, this behavioral effect was correlated with an early (∼135 msec) increase of left fronto-central activity for the emotionally congruent combination, whose cerebral sources were notably located in the left orbitofrontal cortex. We therefore suggest that the prior spatial distribution of emotional salience, like physical salience, grabs attentional resources and modifies the performance in the center of the visual field. Thus, these data shed light on the neurobehavioral correlates of the emotional coding of visual space.