Gilles Pourtois

Ghent University | UGhent · Department of Experimental Clinical and Health Psychology

Hypervigilance involves increased attentional scanning of the environment to facilitate the detection of possible threats. Accordingly, this state is mostly bound to external attention and as a corollary, it might be detrimental to internal attention and further affect attentional balance defined as the ability to switch dynamically between these t...

Threat-related stimuli can capture attention. However, it remains debated whether this capture is automatic or not. To address this question, we compared attentional biases to emotional faces using a dot-probe task (DPT) where emotion was never goal-relevant (Experiment 1) or made directly task-relevant by means of induction trials (Experiments 2-3...

On the centenary of the first human EEG recording, more than 500 experts reflect on the impact that this discovery has had on our understanding of the brain and behaviour. We document their priorities and call for collective action focusing on validity, democratization and responsibility to realize the potential of EEG in science and society over t...

Cognitive control is flexible and often based on two competing processing modes: reactive vs. proactive control. This begs the question of how human subjects can flexibly switch between them. In this EEG study, we addressed this question by systematically altering the contingency created between conflict and performance in different conditions. Fif...

Visual stimuli previously associated with reward automatically capture attention when used as distractor, as shown by value-driven attentional capture (VDAC) effects. However, whether or not VDAC can also occur when attention is directed to internal information held in visual memory remains unclear. In two experiments, we compared VDAC for external...

Emotional signals such as threat receive privileged access to awareness and modulate attention. Although some previous studies found that threat-related stimuli capture attention automatically, others have suggested instead that this capture actually depends on goals and hence is not fully automatic. The goal of this study was to assess whether the...

Error monitoring is a crucial aspect of behavioral regulation which has been studied extensively in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Lab studies often observe increased caution following own and others’ errors. Moreover, social error monitoring research suggests that cooperation and shared goals elicit stronger adaptations to others’ errors t...

Threat-related stimuli can capture attention. However, it remains debated whether this capture is automatic or is modulated by the goal-relevance of emotion. To address this question, we compared attentional biases to emotional faces using a dot-probe task (DPT) where emotion was never goal-relevant (Experiment 1, n = 40) or made directly task-rele...

Hypervigilance involves increased attentional scanning of the environment to facilitate the detection of possible threats. Accordingly, this state is mostly bound to external attention and as a corollary, it might be detrimental to internal attention and further affect attentional balance defined as the ability to switch dynamically between these t...

The current registered report focused on the temporal dynamics of the relationship between expectancy and attention toward threat, to better understand the mechanisms underlying the prioritization of threat detection over expectancy. In the current event‐related potentials experiment, a‐priori expectancy was manipulated, and attention bias was meas...

When making decisions, humans aim to maximize rewards while minimizing costs. The exertion of mental or physical effort has been proposed to be one those costs, translating into avoidance of behaviors carrying effort demands. This motivational framework also predicts that people should experience positive affect when anticipating demand that is sub...

Introduction Punishment is a powerful drive that fosters aversive motivation and increases negative affect. Previous studies have reported that this drive has the propensity to improve cognitive control, as shown by improved conflict processing when it is used. However, whether aversive motivation per se or negative affect eventually drives this ch...

When making decisions, humans aim to maximize rewards while minimizing costs. The exertion of mental or physical effort has been proposed to be one those costs, translating into avoidance of behaviors carrying effort demands. This motivational framework also predicts that people should experience positive affect when anticipating demand that is sub...

The C1 ERP component reflects the earliest visual processing in V1. However, it remains debated whether attentional load can influence it or not. We conducted two EEG experiments to investigate the effect of attentional load on the C1. Task difficulty was manipulated at fixation using an oddball detection task that was either easy (low load) or dif...

Two event-related brain potential (ERP) components elicited during feedback processing are the frontocentral feedback-related negativity (FRN), followed by the posterior P300. According to the Error-Related Reinforcement Learning Theory (Holroyd & Coles, 2002), the FRN amplitude is largest when the outcome is negative and unexpected. Complementing...

The C1 event‐related potential (ERP) captures the earliest stage of feedforward processing in the primary visual cortex (V1). An ongoing debate is whether top‐down selective attention can modulate the C1. One side of the debate pointed out that null findings appear to outnumber positive findings; thus, selective attention does not seem to influence...

Conflict adaptation refers to the dynamic modulation of conflict processing across successive trials and reflects improved cognitive control. Interestingly, aversive motivation can increase conflict adaptation, although it remains unclear through which process this modulation occurs because previous studies presented punishment feedback following s...

Negative affect facilitates conflict processing. Here we sought to assess whether symmetrically, its downregulation by means of reappraisal could lower it. To this end, 105 participants performed the confound-minimized Stroop task eliciting negative affect that was followed by a simple reward-related visual discrimination task. Conflict processing...

The congruency sequence effect (CSE) refers to facilitated conflict processing following incongruent than congruent trials, and reflects enhanced cognitive control during conflict processing. Although this effect is mostly conceived as being reactive, proactive control can also unlock it under specific circumstances according to previous studies (e...

Until today, there is an ongoing discussion if attention processes interact with the information processing stream already at the level of the C1, the earliest visual electrophysiological response of the cortex. We used two highly powered experiments (each N = 52) and examined the effects of task relevance, spatial attention, and attentional load o...

The goal of temporal difference (TD) reinforcement learning is to maximize outcomes and improve future decision-making. It does so by utilizing a prediction error (PE), which quantifies the difference between the expected and the obtained outcome. In gambling tasks, however, decision-making cannot be improved because of the lack of learnability. On...

Research over the past decades has demonstrated the explanatory power of emotions, feelings, motivations, moods, and other affective processes when trying to understand and predict how we think and behave. In this consensus article, we ask: has the increasingly recognized impact of affective phenomena ushered in a new era, the era of affectivism?

Positive affect has been linked to increased flexibility in disparate domains, however, conclusions across these domains are still missing. In this review, we focus on flexibility studied in the context of cognitive control and attention, where striking similarities are observed. Positive affect increases flexibility and broadens attention at the c...

The determinants of affect proposed by the appraisal theory, the goal-directed theory, and the predictive processing theory are compared. The first theory attaches a role to multiple factors (goal-related factors, expectation-related factors, and control), the second theory only focuses on goal-related factors, and the third theory only focuses on...

Electroencephalography (EEG) is a widespread neurophysiological measure used to study cognition, emotion and their interaction. There is a strong history and a growing body of EEG research investigating positive affect (PA). In the current article, we focus on EEG components which are increasingly informing the science of PA. We review EEG frequenc...

Positive emotions are an important part of human life. They can be very strong, for example when we fall in love, land our dream job, or attend a concert or sports event. But more often they are less intense, for example when enjoying a meal or watching a sunset on a beautiful summer evening. Since the seminal work in the 1990s by Barbara Fredricks...

The cover image is based on the Paper Children’s automatic evaluation of self‐generated actions is different from adults by Solange Denervaud et al., https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13045

The neurocognitive process underlying attention switches between external (perception-based) and internal (memory-based) attention is poorly characterized. Previous research has found that when participants switch attention either between two perception-based tasks (within-domain switches) or between a memory- and a perception-based task (between-d...

There is growing awareness across the neuroscience community that the replicability of findings on the relationship between brain activity and cognitive phenomena can be improved by conducting studies with high statistical power that adhere to well-defined and standardized analysis pipelines. Inspired by efforts from the psychological sciences, and...

There is growing awareness across the neuroscience community that the replicability of findings on the relationship between brain activity and cognitive phenomena can be improved by conducting studies with high statistical power that adhere to well-defined and standardised analysis pipelines. Inspired by efforts from the psychological sciences, and...

Performance monitoring (PM) is central to learning and decision making. It allows individuals to swiftly detect deviations between actions and intentions, such as response errors, and adapt behavior accordingly. Previous research showed that in adult participants, error monitoring is associated with two distinct and robust behavioral effects. First...

At present, the process of switching attention between external stimuli and internal representations is not well understood. To address this, Verschooren, Liefooghe, Brass, and Pourtois (2019) recently designed a novel paradigm where participants were cued to switch attention between external and internal information on a trial-by-trial basis. The...

Feedback signaling the success or failure of actions is readily exploited to implement goal-directed behavior. Two event-related brain potentials (ERPs) have been identified as reliable markers of evaluative feedback processing: the Feedback-Related Negativity (FRN) and the P3. Recent ERP studies have shown a substantial reduction of these componen...

Learning biases in Pavlovian aversive conditioning have been found in response to specific categories of threat-relevant stimuli, such as snakes or angry faces. This has been suggested to reflect a selective predisposition to preferentially learn to associate stimuli that provided threats to survival across evolution with aversive outcomes. Here, w...

In a previous study (Paul & Pourtois, 2017), we found that positive mood substantially influenced the neural processing of reward, mostly by altering expectations and creating an optimistic bias. Under positive mood, the Reward Positivity (RewP) component and fronto-medial theta activity (FMθ) in response to monetary feedback were both changed comp...

When perceivers view multiple facial expressions shown concurrently, they can quickly and precisely extract the mean emotion from the set. Yet it is not clear how many faces in the set contribute to summary judgments, and how the variance among them influences this process. To address these questions, we used the subset manipulation and varied emot...

At present, the process of switching attention between external stimuli and internal representations is not well understood. To address this, Verschooren and colleagues (2019) recently designed a novel paradigm where participants were cued to switch attention between external and internal information on a trial-by-trial basis. The authors observed...

Attention flexibility is a fundamental ability, which has been explored extensively in the past. However, neurocognitive mechanisms underlying switches of attention between working memory (WM) and perceptual stimuli are still poorly understood. Previous research has found that when participants occasionally switch attention either between two perce...

Reward processing is influenced by reward magnitude, as previous EEG studies showed changes in amplitude of the feedback-related negativity (FRN) and reward positivity (RewP), or power of fronto-medial theta (FMθ). However, it remains unclear whether these changes are driven by increased reward sensitivity, altered reward predictions, enhanced cogn...

Antisocial personality disorder is characterized by a stable, lifelong pattern of disregard for and violation of others' rights. Disruptions in the representation of fairness norms may represent a key mechanism in the development and maintenance of this disorder. Here, we investigated fairness norm considerations and reactions to their violations....

Converging evidence in human electrophysiology suggests that evaluative feedback provided during performance monitoring (PM) elicits two distinctive and successive ERP components: the feedback-related negativity (FRN) and the P3b. Whereas the FRN has previously been linked to reward prediction error (RPE), the P3b has been conceived as reflecting m...

Whereas the effects of attention switches occurring within perception or memory are relatively well understood, much less is known about switches of attention between them. We discuss the methodological limitations of initial research on this topic, which was never integrated with the broader cognitive literature. On the basis of this discussion, w...

Cognitive control is highly dynamic, and liable to variations in the affective state of participants. Recently, we found that defensive motivation, elicited by means of loss-related feedback contingent on task performance, actually increased conflict adaptation at the behavioral level, and hence tightened cognitive control. However, it remains uncl...

Whereas the effects of attention switches occurring within perception or memory are relatively well understood, much less is known about switches of attention between them. We discuss the methodological limitations of initial research on this topic, which was never integrated with the broader cognitive literature. On the basis of this discussion, w...

Pavlovian aversive conditioning is a fundamental form of learning helping organisms survive in their environment. Previous research has suggested that organisms are prepared to preferentially learn to fear stimuli that have posed threats to survival across evolution. Here, we examined whether enhanced Pavlovian aversive conditioning can occur to st...

The congruency sequence effect (CSE) reflected by the influence of the congruency of the previous trial on the current one translates improved cognitive control (CC). Yet, it remains debated whether reactive or proactive control processes mostly contribute to this effect. To address this question, we administered a Stroop task controlling for effec...

Despite its everyday ubiquity, not much is currently known about cognitive processes involved in flexible shifts of attention between external and internal information. An important model in the task-switching literature, which can serve as a blueprint for attentional flexibility, states that switch costs correspond to the time needed for a serial...

Major depression is characterized by abnormal reward processing and reinforcement learning (RL). This impairment might stem from deficient motivation processes, in addition to reduced reward sensitivity. In this study, we recorded 64-channel EEG in a large cohort of major depressive disorder (MDD) patients and matched healthy controls (HC) while th...

Despite its everyday ubiquity, not much is currently known about cognitive processes involved in flexible shifts of attention between external and internal information. An important model in the task-switching literature, which can serve as a blueprint for attentional flexibility, states that switch costs correspond to the time needed for a serial...

Performance monitoring (PM) entails the continuous evaluation of actions and their outcomes. At the electrophysiological level, PM has been consistently related to two event-related brain potentials (ERPs): the Feedback-Related Negativity (FRN) and the P3. In a previous within-subject crossover design study, we showed that feedback’s goal impact (i...

Despite its evolutionary and clinical significance, appetitive conditioning has been rarely investigated in humans. It has been proposed that this discrepancy might stem from the difficulty in finding suitable appetitive stimuli that elicit strong physiological responses. However, this might also be due to a possible lack of sensitivity of the psyc...

Processing affectively charged visual stimuli typically results in increased amplitude of specific event-related potential (ERP) components. Low-level features similarly modulate electrophysiological responses, with amplitude changes proportional to variations in stimulus size and contrast. However, it remains unclear whether emotion-related amplif...

We adapted the dot probe paradigm employed by Pourtois et al. (2004) to include a manipulation of feature specific attention allocation. In two experiments, participants switched between performing a dot probe task and an induction task that was aimed at encouraging the participant to selectively attend to one of two possible stimulus features. One...

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Pavlovian aversive conditioning is an evolutionarily well-conserved adaptation enabling organisms to learn to associate environmental stimuli with biologically aversive events. However, mechanisms underlying preferential (or enhanced) Pavlovian aversive conditioning remain unclear. Previous research has suggested that only specific stimuli that hav...

Processing affectively charged visual stimuli typically results in increased amplitude of specific event-related potential (ERP) components. Low-level features similarly modulate electrophysiological responses, with amplitude changes proportional to variations in stimulus size and contrast. However, it remains unclear whether emotion-related amplif...

We examined the processing capacity and the role of emotion variance in ensemble representation for multiple facial expressions shown concurrently. A standard set size manipulation was used, whereby the sets consisted of 4, 8, or 16 morphed faces each uniquely varying along a happy-angry continuum (Experiment 1) or a neutral-happy/angry continuum (...

We tested the processing capacity of establishing ensemble representation for multiple facial expressions using the simultaneous-sequential paradigm. Each set consisted of 16 faces conveying a variable amount of happy and angry expressions. Participants judged on a continuous scale the perceived average emotion from each face set (Experiment 1). In...

Supporting Information for: Stussi, Y., Delplanque, S., Coraj, S., Pourtois, G., & Sander, D. (in press). Measuring Pavlovian appetitive conditioning in humans with the postauricular reflex. Psychophysiology. https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.13073

Voluntary orienting of spatial attention is typically investigated by visually presented directional cues, which are called predictive when they indicate where the target is more likely to appear. In this study, we investigated the nature of the potential link between cue predictivity (the proportion of valid trials) and the strength of the resulti...

Supplemental materials for: Stussi, Y., Pourtois, G., & Sander, D. (2018). Enhanced Pavlovian aversive conditioning to positive emotional stimuli. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147, 905-923. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000424

Negative emotion influences cognitive control, and more specifically conflict adaptation. However, discrepant results have often been reported in the literature. In this study, we broke down negative emotion into integral and incidental components using a modern motivation-based framework, and assessed whether the former could change conflict adapt...

Effort expenditure has an aversive connotation and it can lower hedonic feelings. In this study, we explored the electrophysiological correlates of the complex interplay of reward processing with cost anticipation. To this aim, healthy adult participants performed a gambling task where the outcome (monetary reward vs. no-reward) and its expectancy...

Human observers can readily extract the mean emotion from multiple faces shown briefly. However, it remains currently debated whether this ability depends on attention or not. To address this question, in this study, we recorded lateralized event-related brain potentials (i.e., N2pc and SPCN) to track covert shifts of spatial attention, while healt...

The stimulus-preceding negativity (SPN) component reflects the anticipatory phase of reward processing. Its amplitude is usually larger for informative compared to uninformative upcoming stimuli, as well as for uncertain relative to predictable ones. In this study, we sought to assess whether these two effects, when combined together, produced a sy...

Evaluative feedback provided during performance monitoring (PM) elicits either a positive or negative deflection ~250-300ms after its onset in the event-related potential (ERP) depending on whether the outcome is reward-related or not, as well as expected or not. However, it remains currently unclear whether these two deflections reflect a unitary...

The importance of positive mood for health and well-being is a truism. However, we still lack clear understanding of the nature and range of modulatory effects created by positive mood on cognition in humans. Here, we briefly review two recent research lines that have attempted to address this question systematically. Specifically, research on atte...

Whether averaging multiple facial expressions shown simultaneously requires attention or not remains debated in the literature. In this ERP study, we addressed this question by using a standard spatial cueing task during which participants had to report the average emotion of four individual faces shown in the periphery (without overt eye movements...