Abstract
The present study investigated how attentional selection and monetary incentives influence social and emotional judgment on unfamiliar faces and scenes. Attentional selection was modulated with a Go/No-Go task. A transparent color cue was superimposed on the face or scene stimuli. The participants responded when the Go cue appeared and inhibited their responses when the No-Go cue appeared. In the following evaluation task, the participants evaluated the trustworthiness of faces and the beauty of scenes. In Experiment 1, when monetary incentives were absent, no evaluation bias was observed on the Go trials. Only on the No-Go trials, the participants evaluated the uncued face more trustworthy than the cued one. When monetary incentives were given, however, evaluation bias was observed on both the Go and No-Go trials. On the Go trials, the uncued faces were evaluated less trustworthy and the uncued scenes were evaluated less beautiful. In addition, the participants evaluated the uncued face more trustworthy on the No-Go trials. The results of Experiment 1 implied that social-emotional traits of stimuli were devalued when the stimuli were inhibited by attention and this devaluation effect could be strengthened with monetary incentives. Experiment 2 was conducted to determine whether the devaluation effect in Experiment 1 was due to strengthened attentional selection. In Experiment 2, attention was directly modulated by endogenous arrow cues. When a valid arrow cue was present, the participants showed evaluation bias on both the Go and No-Go trials with face stimuli, which was similar to the results of trials with monetary incentives in Experiment 1. Taken together, these results suggest that evaluation of stimuli can be biased by attention and that monetary incentives can strengthen attentional effects on social and emotional judgment.
This research was supported by a grant (M103KV010018-07K2201-01810) from Brain Research Center of the 21st Century Frontier Research Program funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Republic of Korea.