Facilitation and interference of the automatic information processing on a reaction time task to threat-relevant stimuli

  1. Marcos Malmierca, José Luis
  2. Redondo Lago, Jaime Mauro
Journal:
Psicothema

ISSN: 0214-9915

Year of publication: 2005

Volume: 17

Issue: 2

Pages: 332-337

Type: Article

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Abstract

Facilitación e interferencia del procesamiento automático de la información sobre una tarea de tiempo de reacción ante estímulos amenazantes. El objetivo de este experimento era estudiar si los estímulos amenazantes reciben procesamiento automático cuando son presentados eficazmente enmascarados en un paradigma de priming. El prime consistió en un rostro con expresión amenazante (A) y una cara con expresión neutra como estímulo irrelevante de amenaza (N). Los mismos estímulos fueron utilizados como target (o máscara), dando lugar a cuatro condiciones de enmascaramiento (A/A, N/N, A/N y N/A). Además, el target fue utilizado como un estímulo imperativo para una tarea de tiempo de reacción (TR). Treinta y dos sujetos fueron expuestos a 10 ensayos de cada condición de enmascaramiento con una asincronía del estímulo (SOA) de 34 milisegundos (ms). Otros tantos sujetos recibieron los mismos ensayos, pero con un SOA de 51 ms. Los resultados demuestran que la presentación eficazmente enmascarada de los estímulos amenazantes produce facilitación o interferencia con la tarea de TR, dependiendo de si el target (máscara) consiste en un estímulo relevante o irrelevante de amenaza.

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