A influência de estímulos afetivos sobre a integração sensório-motora e processamento cognitivo em uma tarefa de compatibilidade estímulo-resposta

Abstract

Emotional stimuli are important biological sources of information that influence the individual's behavior due to facilitations and inhibitions that occur at various levels of the sensorimotor system. In addition, the spatial location of a visual stimulus influences the behavior, since the subject tends to have lower motor latencies and more accurate responses when his motor action is compatible with the spatial position of the target object (ipsilateral response), than in the condition opposite (contralateral response). Approach and avoidance reactions have been proposed to explain the modulation of the spatial compatibility effect as a function of the affective valence of the stimuli. Using the Affective Spatial Correspondence task (AffSCt) experimental protocol developed by Conde et al. (2011), the present study aimed to assess how and whether affective stimuli from different categories influence sensorimotor integration and cognitive processing in a spatial compatibility task. Sixty-six volunteers underwent two experiments whose stimuli were the names of candidates for the presidency of Brazil in 2018 and the words "live" and "die". In Experiment 1, the names of favorite and rival candidates (voter preference) and in Experiment 2, the words live and die, were presented on the left or right of the center of the screen and two mapping-rules were used. In Mapping 1, participants made ipsilateral responses with the name of the favorite candidate / live and contralateral responses with the name of the rival / dying candidate. In Mapping 2 the rule was reversed. Reaction times were subjected to ANOVA and distributional analyzes that revealed that responses to mapping rule 1 were faster than for mapping-rule 2 and faster for positive stimulus in Experiment 1. However, in Experiment 2, the responses were faster for the negative stimulus. In addition, it was identified that the activating and suppressing mechanisms related to the processing and integration of the characteristics relevant to the response (affective valence and spatial location of the stimulus / response), need time to be effective, especially those related to suppression. Therefore, it is concluded that not only figures and / or images are able to influence the subject's behavior, but words also have a modulatory capacity on the response depending on the emotion caused in the subject; and that it is not enough that the stimuli have different polarities (antagonism) for this influence to occur, since the modulatory capacity will depend on the type (category) of the target stimulus.