Emotion meets attention: The role of left-to-right valence mapping in an exogenous cueing task

In the Posner cueing task for exogenous attention orientation, spatial correspondence between the lateralized cue and target is beneficial under conditions of short asynchrony. How such a benefit is modulated by target qualia, like faces expressing either the most positive (happy relative to angry faces in Experiment 1, as well as neutral relative to angry faces in the negative group of Experiment 2) or negative (neutral relative to happy faces in the positive group of Experiment 2) emotion in a set, is an unsolved question. We expected that the spatial mapping of emotional valence conveyed by facial expressions would modulate localization response latencies, producing a compatibility effect: faster responses to negative emotions on the left and positive emotions on the right. Results of both experiments are consistent with our expectation, showing a novel type of attentional spatial compatibility effect dependent on the encoding of target properties: a Target-dependent Emotional Attentional Spatial Compatibility effect (the TEASC effect). We showed how the TEASC effect can be accounted for by a novel latency decomposition approach which disentangles the independent contributions of two well-established components of covert attentional orienting from response latencies. We decomposed response latencies in a sequence of events, one due to the voluntary attention component (directed toward the target) and the other to the reflexive attention component (directed toward the cue). Results show that the left-to-right valence mapping impacts the voluntary component only. This is consistent with a model of attention that disentangles reflexive and voluntary covert orienting mechanisms—with at least the latter being affect-driven.