Selective visual attention to emotional pictures: Interactions of task-relevance and emotion are restricted to the late positive potential

The temporal dynamics of top-down voluntary and bottom-up driven emotional attention are a matter of debate. Both emotion and task-relevance have been shown to affect the early posterior negativity (EPN) and the late positive potential (LPP) during the processing of emotional pictures, whereas there are mixed findings related to interactions of emotion and task-relevance. In this preregistered study, we used Bayesian models to test this interplay between emotion and task-relevance. Participants (N = 104) were presented negative, neutral, and positive International Affective Picture System (IAPS) pictures, and block-wise were asked to respond either to negative, neutral, or positive pictures, rendering one stimulus category task-relevant and the remaining stimuli task-irrelevant. Bayesian models showed evidence for the absence of interactions between task-relevance and emotion. Furthermore, models showed parallel emotion and task effects for the EPN and late stages of the LPP. Additional interactive effects were found during an early LPP interval (400 to 600 ms), with increased LPP amplitudes when emotion was rendered task-relevant. Taken together, the results revealed distinct but parallel temporal onsets of task-relevance and emotion effects, followed by task and emotion interactions in the early LPP. Thus, based on this high-powered study employing Bayesian analysis, evidence is provided that interactions between task-relevance and emotion do not emerge before the LPP time window. These results further inform theories proposing early parallel and late interactive processes of the emotional salience of stimuli and top-down attention.