Emotion influences behavioral outcomes and attention during goal-directed reading

Emotions can greatly influence cognitive processes, such as reading. However, recent studies on the interaction between emotions and reading comprehension provide a murky picture with contradictory claims. Here, we offer one explanation for this phenomenon, that is, the influence of emotion is dependent on different attention goals during reading comprehension. To test this hypothesis, we manipulated question types that were presented to participants prior to reading to evoke different attentional goals. By utilizing an advanced eye movement analysis method Eye Movement with Hidden Markov Models (EMHMM) with co-clustering, we discovered two representative attention patterns from eye fixations: an expanded, globalized attention pattern and a more focused, localized attention pattern. The subsequent analysis showed that globalized pattern led to better comprehension accuracy for summative questions, and localized pattern facilitated detailed question answering. Moreover, negative emotion induces more localized attention for detailed questions only, which could further explain its facilitation effect in detailed question answering. Our findings suggest that the impact of emotions on reading comprehension is shaped by the attention goal of the task. This suggests that emotion appears to guide attention in ways that either support or hinder comprehension depending on what the higher-level goal is.