Recent studies indicate that emotion enhances early vision, but the generality of this finding remains unknown. Do the benefits of emotion extend to all basic aspects of vision, or are they limited in scope? Our results show that the brief presentation of a fearful face, compared with a neutral face, enhances sensitivity for the orientation of subsequently presented low-spatial-frequency stimuli, but diminishes orientation sensitivity for high-spatial-frequency stimuli. This is the first demonstration that emotion not only improves but also impairs low-level vision. The selective low-spatial-frequency benefits are consistent with the idea that emotion enhances magnocellular processing. Additionally, we suggest that the high-spatial-frequency deficits are due to inhibitory interactions between magnocellular and parvocellular pathways. Our results suggest an emotion-induced trade-off in visual processing, rather than a general improvement. This trade-off may benefit perceptual dimensions that are relevant for survival at the expense of those that are less relevant.

Performing online behavioral research is gaining increased popularity among researchers in psychological and cognitive science. However, the currently available methods for conducting online reaction time experiments are often complicated and typically require advanced technical skills. In this article, we introduce the Qualtrics Reaction Time Engine (QRTEngine), an open-source JavaScript engine that can be embedded in the online survey development environment Qualtrics. The QRTEngine can be used to easily develop browser-based online reaction time experiments with accurate timing within current browser capabilities, and it requires only minimal programming skills. After introducing the QRTEngine, we briefly discuss how to create and distribute a Stroop task. Next, we describe a study in which we investigated the timing accuracy of the engine under different processor loads using external chronometry. Finally, we show that the QRTEngine can be used to reproduce classic behavioral effects in three reaction time paradigms: a Stroop task, an attentional blink task, and a masked-priming task. These findings demonstrate that QRTEngine can be used as a tool for conducting online behavioral research even when this requires accurate stimulus presentation times.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.3758/s13428-014-0530-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Previous findings suggest that emotional stimuli sometimes improve (emotion-induced hypervision) and sometimes impair (emotion-induced blindness) the visual perception of subsequent neutral stimuli. We hypothesized that these differential carryover effects might be due to 2 distinct emotional influences in visual processing. On the one hand, emotional stimuli trigger a general enhancement in the efficiency of visual processing that can carry over onto other stimuli. On the other hand, emotional stimuli benefit from a stimulus-specific enhancement in later attentional processing at the expense of competing visual stimuli. We investigated whether detrimental (blindness) and beneficial (hypervision) carryover effects of emotion in perception can be dissociated within a single experimental paradigm. In 2 experiments, we manipulated the temporal competition for attention between an emotional cue word and a subsequent neutral target word by varying cue-target interstimulus interval (ISI) and cue visibility. Interestingly, emotional cues impaired target identification at short ISIs but improved target identification when competition was diminished by either increasing ISI or reducing cue visibility, suggesting that emotional significance of stimuli can improve and impair visual performance through distinct perceptual mechanisms.

In order to engage in goal-directed behavior, cognitive agents have to control the processing of task-relevant features in their environments. Although cognitive control is critical for performance in unpredictable task environments, it is currently unknown how it affects performance in highly structured and predictable environments. In the present study, we showed that, counterintuitively, top-down control can impair and interfere with the otherwise automatic integration of statistical information in a predictable task environment, and it can render behavior less efficient than it would have been without the attempt to control the flow of information. In other words, less can sometimes be more (in terms of cognitive control), especially if the environment provides sufficient information for the cognitive system to behave on autopilot based on automatic processes alone.

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In the present study, we demonstrated that the emotional significance of a spatial cue enhances the effect of covert attention on spatial and temporal resolution (i.e., our ability to discriminate small spatial details and fast temporal flicker). Our results indicated that fearful face cues, as compared with neutral face cues, enhanced the attentional benefits in spatial resolution but also enhanced the attentional deficits in temporal resolution. Furthermore, we observed that the overall magnitudes of individuals’ attentional effects correlated strongly with the magnitude of the emotion × attention interaction effect. Combined, these findings provide strong support for the idea that emotion enhances the strength of a cue’s attentional response.

It is generally assumed that emotion facilitates human vision in order to promote adaptive responses to a potential threat in the environment. Surprisingly, we recently found that emotion in some cases impairs the perception of elementary visual features (Bocanegra & Zeelenberg, 2009b). Here, we demonstrate that emotion improves fast temporal vision at the expense of fine-grained spatial vision. We tested participants' threshold resolution with Landolt circles containing a small spatial or brief temporal discontinuity. The prior presentation of a fearful face cue, compared with a neutral face cue, impaired spatial resolution but improved temporal resolution. In addition, we show that these benefits and deficits were triggered selectively by the global configural properties of the faces, which were transmitted only through low spatial frequencies. Critically, the common locus of these opposite effects suggests a trade-off between magno- and parvocellular-type visual channels, which contradicts the common assumption that emotion invariably improves vision. We show that, rather than being a general "boost" for all visual features, affective neural circuits sacrifice the slower processing of small details for a coarser but faster visual signal.

The multiple-look notion holds that the difference limen (DL) decreases with multiple observations. We investigated this notion for temporal discrimination in isochronous sound sequences. In Experiment 1, we established a multiple-look effect when sequences comprised nine standard time intervals (S) followed by an increasing number of comparison time intervals (C), but no multiple-look effect when one trailing C interval was preceded by an increasing number of S intervals. In Experiment 2, we extended the design. There were four sequential conditions: (a) 9 leading S intervals followed by 1, 2, …, or 9 C-intervals; (b) 9 leading C intervals followed by 1, 2, …, or 9 S intervals; (c) 9 trailing C-intervals preceded by 1, 2, …, or 9 S-intervals; and (d) 9 trailing S-intervals preceded by 1, 2, …, or 9 C-intervals. Both the interval accretions before and after the tempo change caused multiple-look effects, irrespective of the time order of S and C. Complete deconfounding of the number of intervals before and after the tempo change was accomplished in Experiment 3. The multiple-look effect of interval accretion before the tempo change was twice as big as that after the tempo change. The diminishing returns relation between the DL and interval accretion could be described well by a reciprocal function.