It is widely thought that emotional stimuli receive privileged neural status compared to their non-affective counterparts. This prioritization, however, comes at a cost, as the neural capacity of the human brain is finite; the prioritization of any one object comes at the expense of other concurrent objects in the visual array competing for awareness (Desimone & Duncan, 1995). Despite this reality, little work has examined the functional benefit derived from the perceptual prioritization of affective information. Why do we preferentially attend to emotional faces? According to evolutionary accounts, emotions originated as adaptations towards action, helping to prepare the organism for movement (Darwin, 1872; Frijda, 1986). The current dissertation examines this from the perceptive of visual neuroscience and motor cognition. Chapters 1 and 2 examine the mechanisms involved during the perceptual prioritization of emotional content in the context of action system modulation. Chapters 3 and 4 then directly examine emotions effect on oculomotor action output. Results across the studies are discussed in the context of evolutionary theories related to biological origins of emotional expression.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/30032 |
| Date | 14 November 2011 |
| Creators | West, Gregory |
| Contributors | Jay, Pratt |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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