Global–local processing and dispositional bias interact with emotion processing in the psychological refractory period paradigm

The reciprocal link between scope of attention and emotional processing is an important aspect of the relationship between emotion and attention. Larger scope of attention or global processing has been linked to positive emotions and narrow scope of attention or local processing has been linked to negative emotions. The nature of this relationship in the context of central capacity limitations and individual differences in attentional processing has not been studied in detail so far. To investigate such a relationship, here we used the psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm, in which we manipulated the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA: 150 ms, 300 ms, 900 ms) of stimuli corresponding to two tasks in a sequence. The first task was identifying a number at the global or local level; the second task was recognizing the emotional expression (happy or angry). Additionally, predisposition towards local or global perceptual dimension was measured with the global–local task. Results indicated that global precedence modulated PRP effect and that response accuracy was impaired by the combination of local–angry task modalities. Interestingly, interference between simultaneous tasks was modulated by the predisposition to different perceptual levels resulting in different cognitive strategies for performing simultaneous tasks: locally biased subjects tended more towards serial processing, meanwhile globally biased ones were performing tasks in a parallel manner. This result suggest that individual differences may play a role in the choice of dual-task performing strategies.