Annika Ziereis and Anne Schacht honored for outstanding publication
Annika Ziereis and Anne Schacht from the University of Göttingen and members of the Leibniz ScienceCampus were awarded the prize for the best publication by the Psychonomic Society. Their work appeared in the journal Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience.
In their award-winning study “Motivated attention and task relevance in the processing of cross-modally associated faces: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence”, Ziereis and Schacht investigated how affective stimuli - in this case emotional speech sounds - can influence the processing of neutral faces. In an experiment, the participants learned to associate faces with emotional speech sounds and were then tested to see how well they could recall these associations. This showed that negative emotional associations are processed in the brain at an early stage, regardless of the task. In contrast, positive and negative associations only influenced later processing stages if the task was explicitly aimed at classifying emotional valence. These results illustrate how important the type of attention is in the processing of emotional information and that emotional associations can be successfully established between different sensory modalities.