Aguado, L. , Valdes-Conroy, B. & Fernandez-Cahill, M.
UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID
Extensive previous evidence from event-related potential (ERP) studies has shown that early components sensitive to visual encoding of faces are modulated by their emotional expression, suggesting that affective relevance influences perceptual processing since the earliest stages of information analysis. In this study we looked at the influence of differences in task demand on these modulations. Happy, angry and expressively neutral faces were presented under three different task conditions, 1) emotion discrimination (emotional vs non-emotional), 2) gender discrimination and 3) irrelevant task (discriminating two symbols placed over the nose region). Supporting previous work we found significant modulations due to emotional expression on the P100, N170 and EPN (early posterior negativity) components, detected over posterior regions. A right-lateralized, late positive component (LPC), detected over posterior regions around 400 ms after stimulus onset, appeared to be sensitive only to task demands, with larger amplitudes for the emotion discrimination task. A lack of interactions between emotional expression and task demands suggests that the influence of facial expression on perceptual processing takes place regardless of the explicit orientation to the affective meaning of faces. Supported by grant PSI2010_18682, of the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (Spain)