Attention to the periphery attenuates the EPN and LPP

Current research shows that emotions have an important role in guiding attention and cognitions especially when the emotional stimuli are affective. Load theory proposes that when the perceptual load on attention is sufficiently high, irrelevant emotional stimuli is no longer attended to and thus will not produce a distracting effect. In this study 18 participants performed two discrimination tasks where their attention was manipulated spatially. To investigate the effect of spatial attention on ERP components, emotional pictures in 14 different semantic categories were shown while EEG was recorded. The results indicate that a successful perceptual load was achieved, reflected in the behavioral data that show there was a clear difference in performance between tasks. Further the results indicate that a strong effect was achieved in the mean amplitudes of both EPN and LPP corresponding to the semantic categories of pictures. Critically directing the attention to the periphery while emotionally salient pictures were presented attenuated the mean amplitude of both EPN and LPP