Keuper, K. 1 , Beintner, R. 1 , Peter, Z. 2 & Dobel, C. 1
1 Institute for Biomagnetism and Biosignalanalysis, University of Münster
2 Department of Psychiatry, University of Münster
Adaptive behavior requires the brain to deal with a variety of demands such as detecting biologically meaningful events and associating them with significant contextual cues. A huge corpus of research has shown that normal observers exhibit fast involuntary responses to emotional stimuli, in particular, when these are related to potential threats, such as faces with fearful expressions (e.g. Öhman, Esteves, & Soares, 1995, Vuilleumier, Armony, Driver, & Dolan, 2001). However, little is known about the interaction of such processing advantages with other cognitive demands relevant to daily life, like associating people's names with their faces. The present study intended to shed light on this question by combining a statistical learning paradigm (Dobel et al., 2010) with behavioral and physiological measures (simultaneous EEG and MEG). Twenty participants were required to learn associations of visually presented pseudo names with fearful or neutral faces. Both, behavioral and physiological data reveal that new names were rapidly learned and subsequently activated the underlying conceptual representations. Further, behavioral results (cued recall and various implicit measures) display a learning advantage for neutral faces. This finding suggests that the prioritized processing of fearful faces leads to attenuated learning which might partly be due to an avoidance reaction.