The early P2 component reveals attention bias for negative, unexpected behavior

Abstract

Expectancies concerning how people will act are formed from acquired knowledge about what those other people are like, and are used to interpret their ongoing behaviors (see Olson, Roese, & Zanna, 1996). Previous person perception research has shown both a congruency effect, in which expectancy-violating (EV) behavior elicits more effortful and elaborated cognitive processing than expectancy-consistent (EC) behavior, and a positive-negative asymmetry, in which negative behaviors are more influential on perceivers’ judgments than positive behaviors. The current research investigated whether the valence of EV information affects very rapid attentional processes thought to tag goal-relevant information for more elaborative processing at later stages. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded as participants read depictions of behavior that either were consistent with or violated established impressions of fictitious characters. Consistent with predictions, an early attention-related ERP component, the frontal P2, differentiated negative from positive EV behavior but not EC behavior. This effect occurred much earlier in processing than has been demonstrated in prior reports of EV effects on neural responses, suggesting that impression-formation goals tune attention to information that might signal the need to modify existing impressions.