Table 1_Distractor processing of emotional faces: behavioral and women-only fMRI findings on the perceptual load–dilution debate.docx

Because this debate has relied largely on neutral stimuli, it remains unclear whether the same mechanisms govern emotionally meaningful distraction. We examined this question using an all-faces visual search paradigm that separated cue-based attentional demand from display composition while minimizing target–distractor category confounds.</p>Methods<p>In Experiment 1, 60 participants completed a face-discrimination task manipulating cue size, face size, target emotion (happy, angry), and distractor type (neutral, congruent, incongruent).

In Experiment 2, 30 healthy right-handed women completed an fMRI-adapted version of the task during 3T scanning.</p>Results<p>Behaviorally, distractor interference increased with cue size selectively for happy targets, yielding a reversed load effect, whereas face size did not alter interference. During scanning, congruency scores were not significantly modulated by cue size, face size, or target emotion. Neurally, incongruent trials increased activity across bilateral amygdala, anterior cingulate cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and frontal eye fields, and additionally engaged visual, parietal, subcortical, and motor regions.