Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Experimental Brain Research https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-019-05716-7 RESEARCH ARTICLE Global–local processing and dispositional bias interact with emotion processing in the psychological refractory period paradigm Skaiste G. Kerusauskaite 1  · Luca Simione 2  · Antonino Rafone 1,3  · Narayanan Srinivasan 4 Received: 19 November 2018 / Accepted: 20 December 2019 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract The reciprocal link between scope of attention and emotional processing is an important aspect of the relationship between emotion and attention. Larger scope of attention or global processing has been linked to positive emotions and narrow scope of attention or local processing has been linked to negative emotions. The nature of this relationship in the context of central capacity limitations and individual diferences in attentional processing has not been studied in detail so far. To investigate such a relationship, here we used the psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm, in which we manipulated the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA: 150 ms, 300 ms, 900 ms) of stimuli corresponding to two tasks in a sequence. The frst task was identifying a number at the global or local level; the second task was recognizing the emotional expression (happy or angry). Additionally, predisposition towards local or global perceptual dimension was measured with the global–local task. Results indicated that global precedence modulated PRP efect and that response accuracy was impaired by the combination of local–angry task modalities. Interestingly, interference between simultaneous tasks was modulated by the predisposition to diferent perceptual levels resulting in diferent cognitive strategies for performing simultaneous tasks: locally biased subjects tended more towards serial processing, meanwhile globally biased ones were performing tasks in a parallel manner. This result suggest that individual diferences may play a role in the choice of dual-task performing strategies. Keywords Psychological refractory period · Global–local · Emotion · Attention · Emotion recognition · Dual-task Introduction Psychological refractory period and global–local processing The ability to perform two activities simultaneously or in close succession is often overestimated in everyday situ- ations. People are often unaware of interference between two tasks (Bryce and Bratzke 2014, 2017). The time during which the processing of a second task is delayed because limited resources are being used to complete the frst task is defned as psychological refractory period (PRP). The main manipulation in the PRP paradigm is stimulus onset asyn- chrony (SOA), which corresponds to the duration between the onsets of the frst task stimulus and the second task stimulus. The smaller the SOA, the bigger is the overlap in time between two tasks (Pashler 1994a). This efect is very robust and widely generalizable for various kinds of tasks, from driving (Bergen et al. 2013; Levy and Pashler 2008) to time evaluation (Brown et al. 2013). The results have been taken to indicate limitations in parallel processing and the presence of central capacity limitations (Lien et al. 2006; Pashler et al. 2008). Classical understanding of PRP efect has been chal- lenged by the presence of backward crosstalk, i.e., the slowing of reaction time to the frst task due to interference from the succeeding second task (Herman and Kantowitz 1970). This has been supported by multiple behavioral studies (Miller and Alderton 2006; Niewenstein and Wyble Communicated by Carlo Alberto Marzi. * Skaiste G. Kerusauskaite skaiste.gabriele@gmail.com 1 Department of Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Via dei Marsi 78, 00185 Rome, Italy 2 Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, CNR, Rome, Italy 3 School of Buddhist Studies, Philosphy and Comparative Religions, Nalada University, Rajgir, India 4 Centre of Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences, University of Allahabad, Allahabad, India