Journal article

Publication year: 2012

Pages: 98-105

Journal: Brain Research

Volume number: 1429

ISSN: 0006-8993

eISSN: 1872-6240

Open access status: Green

DOI Link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2011.10.032

Publisher: Elsevier

Abstract: 
While previous behavioural research suggests that attitudes, for example towards elderly people, may be activated automatically, this type of research does not provide information about the detailed time-course of such processing in the brain. We investigated the impact of age related attitude information in a Go/NoGo association task that paired photographs of elderly or young faces with positive or negative words. Event related brain potentials showed an N200 (NoGo) component, which appeared earlier in runs which required similar responses for congruent stimulus pairings (e.g. respond to pictures of elderly faces or negative words) than for incongruent pairings (e.g. respond to elderly faces or positive words). As information processing leading to a certain attitude must precede differential brain activity according to the congruence of the paired words and faces, we show that this type of information is activated almost immediately following the structural encoding of the face, between 170 and 230 ms after onset of the face. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Harvard Citation style: van der Lugt, A., Banfield, J., Osinsky, R. and Muente, T. (2012) Brain potentials show rapid activation of implicit attitudes towards young and old people, Brain Research, 1429, pp. 98-105. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2011.10.032

APA Citation style: van der Lugt, A., Banfield, J., Osinsky, R., & Muente, T. (2012). Brain potentials show rapid activation of implicit attitudes towards young and old people. Brain Research. 1429, 98-105. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2011.10.032