The delayed RT in LTAA could reflect a visuo-spatial encoding, decoding, and/or processing group difference that varies by task. It is known that eyes, mouth, and forehead are used in detecting emotions, and it is possible that when asked to identify emotion, alcoholics search face-referenced visuo-spatial information differently than NAC, and that this effect is markedly reduced when processing gender information. Perhaps alcoholics pay more and longer attention to cues in the identify emotion condition. One could investigate this hypothesis using eye tracking. Also filming participants would allow the measurement of emotional facial reactions to images which may also differentiate the groups if alcoholics are more reactive to emotional stimuli (Ekman, personal communication, August 5, 2009). It is most parsimonious to explain the current effect as an emotion effect rather than a visual spatial frequency effect. Maurage et al. (2008b) have shown that the emotion processing demand influences RT, delaying RTs to emotion identification vs. gender, age and race identification tasks. In support of the effect being specific to emotion identification, other groups have used degraded stimuli as control stimuli
