PDF (PhD Thesis Susan Chipchase) - Nottingham eTheses ...

Section 1.2. What effects do emotions have on different aspects of
cognition?
Emotions have been shown to affect early stages of cognition, such as
perception and attention, as well as late stages of cognition, such as
information-processing and memory. Research and theoretical findings
concerning emotions’ influence on attention and memory will be considered in
detail in Section 3 of this introduction as these areas are directly relevant to this
thesis. A brief overview of the influence of emotion on the cognitive processes
of perception and information processing will be given here to provide some
context to the investigations of emotions’ influence on memory.
Section 1.2.2. An early stage of cognition: Perception
In the earliest stage of cognition, that of perceiving stimuli in the
environment, one of the challenges is in deciding which information should be
perceived and processed as it is not possible to process all of the information
with which we are surrounded. As described above, one proposed function of
emotion is to prioritise and demarcate the important information which should
be perceived and processed, at the expense of irrelevant information.
Emotion has been shown to enhance early perceptual processing from
neuroimaging studies (for a review see Vuilleumier, 2005) and behavioural
consequences of this modulation of early visual processing have also been
demonstrated. Presentation of a negative emotional cue (a fearful face) has
been shown to increase the level of sensitivity to contrast in a simple visual
stimulus (Phelps, Ling, & Carrasco, 2006). Further research has shown that
emotion can both improve and impair early vision, by inducing a trade-off in
visual processing and that this may benefit perceptual dimensions which are
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