It has repeatedly been shown that visually presented stimuli can gain additional relevance by their association with affective stimuli. Studies have shown effects of associated affect in event-related potentials (ERP) like the early posterior negativity (EPN), late positive complex (LPC), and even earlier components as the P1 or N170. However, findings are mixed as to the extent associated affect requires directed attention to the emotional quality of a stimulus and which ERP components are sensitive to task instructions during retrieval. In this preregistered study (https://osf.io/ts4pb), we tested cross-modal associations of vocal affect-bursts (positive, negative, neutral) to faces displaying neutral expressions in a flash-card-like learning task, in which participants studied face-voice pairs and learned to correctly assign them to each other. In the subsequent EEG test session, we applied both an implicit (“old-new”) and explicit (“valence-classification”) task to investigate whether the behavior at retrieval and neurophysiological activation of the affect-based associations were dependent on the type of motivated attention. We collected behavioral and neurophysiological data from 40 participants who reached the preregistered learning criterium. Results showed EPN effects of associated negative valence after learning and independent of the task. In contrast, modulations of later stages (LPC) by positive and negative associated valence were restricted to the explicit, i.e., valence-classification, task. These findings highlight the importance of the task at different processing stages and show that cross-modal affect can successfully be associated to faces.

反复证明，视觉呈现的刺激可以通过与情感刺激的关联而获得额外的相关性。研究表明，事件相关电位 (ERP) 中的相关情感会产生影响，例如早期后阴性 (EPN)、晚期阳性复合波 (LPC)，甚至早期的 P1 或 N170 成分。然而，关于相关情感在多大程度上需要对刺激的情绪质量进行直接关注，以及哪些 ERP 组件在检索过程中对任务指令敏感，研究结果是混杂的。在这项预先注册的研究（https://osf.io/ts4pb）中，我们测试了声音情感爆发（积极、消极、中性）与在闪卡式学习任务中表现出中性表情的面孔的跨模式关联，参与者研究了面部声音对并学会了如何正确地将它们分配给彼此。在随后的脑电图测试中，我们应用了隐式（“旧-新”）和显式（“价分类”）任务来研究基于情感的关联的检索行为和神经生理学激活是否依赖于类型的动机性关注。我们收集了 40 名达到预先注册学习标准的参与者的行为和神经生理学数据。结果显示 EPN 效应与学习后相关负价相关且与任务无关。相反，通过正相关价和负相关价对后期（LPC）的调节仅限于明确的（即价分类）任务。这些发现强调了任务在不同处理阶段的重要性，并表明跨模式情感可以成功地与面部相关联。