Cite as:
Bianchi R, Laurent E, 2009, "How global and local visual processings are affected by the priming of affective concepts" Perception 38 ECVP Abstract Supplement, page 55
How global and local visual processings are affected by the priming of affective concepts
R Bianchi, E Laurent
Level-of-focus of visual perception is influenced by affective processes. The affect of joy is associated to a global processing whereas the affect of sadness is correlated to a local processing. Thus, joy would increase a focusing on the whole while sadness would elicit a focusing on the parts. However, recent findings tend to show an unexpected inversion of these results when a mere affective concept--instead of an affective state--is induced. In this experiment, depending on the condition, participants were either primed with joyful, neutral or sad concepts through a sentence unscrambling task. Then, they had to indicate whether a target figure was more similar to a first item matching its global shape or to a second item matching its local components. Results showed that following joy priming, participants processed figures on more local properties as compared to what was observed following sadness priming. Our results confirm that affective concept processing can change subsequent visual perception sensitivity to global and local aspect of stimulation and highlight the need to distinguish between affective state or feeling on the one hand, and affective concept or abstract information on the other hand, each process leading to different consequences for visual perception.
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