Performance monitoring can be based on internal or external signals. We recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate whether relating performance to external signals affects internal performance monitoring. Thirty participants performed a task in which responses were followed by faces whose expressions were partially contingent upon performance. Instructions given to half of the participants mentioned a link between task performance and the upcoming face expression. Instructed participants showed smaller error-related negativity (Ne/ERN) to erroneous responses and larger N170 to faces as compared to participants in the not-instructed group. In addition, we observed a correlation between ∆Ne/ERN and P1-latency benefit for angry faces after errors. Taken together, processing of internally generated signals for performance monitoring is reduced by instructions referring to an emotional face. Furthermore, we relate the correlation between the magnitude of internal monitoring and facilitation in processing angry faces to priming induced by the negative affective meaning of errors.

Repetition blindness (RB) refers to the impairment in reporting two identical targets within a rapid serial visual presentation stream. While numerous studies have demonstrated RB for words and picture of objects, very few studies have examined RB for faces. This study extended this research by examining RB when the two faces were complete repeats (same emotion and identity), identity repeats (same individual, different emotion), and emotion repeats (different individual, same emotion) for identity, gender, and expression judgment tasks. Complete RB and identity RB effects were evident for all three judgment tasks. Emotion RB was only evident for the expression and gender judgments. Complete RB effects were larger than emotion or identity RB effects across all judgment tasks. For the expression judgments, there was more emotion than identity RB. The identity RB effect was larger than the emotion RB effect for the gender judgments. Cross task comparisons revealed larger complete RB effects for the expression and gender judgments than the identity decisions. There was a larger emotion RB effect for the expression than gender judgments and the identity RB effect was larger for the gender than for the identity and expression judgments. These results indicate that while faces are subject to RB, this is affected by the type of repeated information and relevance of the facial characteristic to the judgment decision. This study provides further support for the operation of separate processing mechanisms for face gender, emotion, and identity information within models of face recognition.

Clusters of holes, such as those in a lotus seedpod, induce trypophobic discomfort. Previous research has demonstrated that high-contrast energy at midrange spatial frequencies in images causes trypophobic discomfort. The present study examined the effects on discomfort of eliminating various spatial frequency components from the images to reveal how each spatial frequency contributes to the discomfort. Experiment 1 showed that eliminating midrange spatial frequencies did not affect trypophobic discomfort, while Experiment 2 revealed that images of holes that consisted of only high-spatial frequencies evoked less discomfort than other images and that images containing only low or midrange spatial frequencies induced as much trypophobic discomfort as did the original images. Finally, Experiment 3 found that participants with a high level of the trypophobic trait experienced stronger discomfort from the original images and the images containing only low or midrange spatial frequencies than participants with a low level of the trypophobic trait. Our findings thus suggest that trypophobic discomfort can be induced by middle and low spatial frequencies.