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

may be that the scenes were easier to process in Experiment 10 because
participants were aware of the emotion of each scene before they saw it. In
Experiment 9 participants were also aware of the emotion of each scene before
they saw it, however, it may be that a reminder is needed before each item
(rather than at the start of the block) for participants to retain this as salient
information. If this were the case we would expect that reaction times for the
encoding task in Experiment 10 would be shorter than for Experiment 9.
Unfortunately reaction times were not recorded as part of the experimental
procedure for the encoding task and therefore it is not possible to easily test
this claim.
Another explanation, based on the claim that reduced average fixation
duration reflects reduced visual processing complexity, may be that receiving a
warning of the emotion in Experiment 10 makes the encoding task (an
approach/avoidance task to measure perception of emotion conveyed by scene)
easier and therefore the processing of the picture easier. In Experiment 9,
although the warning of the emotion should have made the encoding task more
easy it may be that blocking the pictures into groups of the same emotion may
have made it more difficult for participants to rate each individual scene for
emotion because further discrimination would have been required between
items as participants may have implicitly made comparisons between items
within each block. If this were the case we would expect a greater variance in
the ratings from the approach / avoidance task for each emotion in Experiment
9, where emotion groups were blocked, than in Experiment 10. We tested this
by analysing the standard deviation in ratings for each participant for scenes of
each emotional type. We found a greater variance in ratings for each of the
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