The investigation of affective and semantic primacy in information processing

Studies directly comparing cognitive and affective primacy suggest that semantic information precedes affective evaluation of visual stimuli. These studies generally use semantic and affective categorization tasks, which may be different in terms of difficulty and diagnostic information. The first aim of the present study is to investigate whether semantic information has processing priority over affective information by using same - different judgment (SDJ) task. The second aim is to examine that whether the processing priority depends on the context in which stimuli are encountered. In experiments, two types of SDJ task were used: (i) In the semantic task, participants were instructed to judge whether or not the two simultaneously presented facial expressions (target stimuli) were same or different in gender dimension. (ii) In the affective task, participants were asked to compare facial expressions according to emotion dimension. The stimuli (happy and fearful expressions) were chosen from Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces according to the results of a pilot study. In the pilot study, facial expressions were presented singly, semantic categorization and affective evaluation tasks were conducted. Thus, the stimuli, which were detected for both gender and emotion accurately in similar processing times, were selected to use in SDJ task. Affective primacy versus semantic primacy were compared directly in the first two experiments that differs in terms of target stimulus presentation time. And the other three experiments were conducted to examine the role of different contexts on the processing priority. To manipulate the context, affective and semantic categorization tasks for visual scenes / words were used. As a result, while participants have enough time to process facial expressions, there is no differences between semantic and affective judgment performance. Conversely, participants have judged more accurately for affective comparison when the presentation time is limited. In addition, the affective comparison was judged more accurately than semantic comparison in the different contexts. The results suggest that affective information has priority over semantic information.