Attentional blink affected by acute stress in women: The role of affective stimuli and attentional resources

Acute stress reduces the emotional attentional blink: Evidence from human electrophysiology

“…These findings confirmed that the beneficial effect of stress was unrelated to the emotionality of the target itself. Kan et al (2019) further clarified the reciprocal effect of the emotional target and attentional resources in women and found that acute stress only enhanced the accuracy of a neutral T2 when it appeared 200 ms after T1. This outcome was not affected by the emotionality of T1.…”

“…The T2 were rotated landscape or building images (90°l eft or right), while the distracting images were upright landscape or architectural images. The image materials were the same as those used by Kan et al (2019) and referred to Kennedy et al (2014). The undergraduates who did not join the formal experiment completed the evaluation of images.…”

“…Specifically, we measured the cortisol levels to reflect the effect of stress and recorded the EPN and LPP amplitudes to represent the stage characteristics of early selective attention and late working memory consolidation during the EAB task, respectively. According to previous studies (Dierolf et al, 2017;Kan et al, 2019;Qi, & Gao, 2020;Schwabe & Wolf, 2010), we hypothesized that stress would reduce the AB effect at the behavioral level and improve the early selective attention process of T2. Based on the trade-off effect (Kranczioch et al, 2007;Shapiro et al, 2006) and the impaired encoding of emotional faces under the threat of shock-induced anxiety (Bolton, & Robinson, 2017), it is tempting to speculate that stress will reduce the working memory consolidation of T1.…”

“…Based on the trade-off effect (Kranczioch et al, 2007;Shapiro et al, 2006) and the impaired encoding of emotional faces under the threat of shock-induced anxiety (Bolton, & Robinson, 2017), it is tempting to speculate that stress will reduce the working memory consolidation of T1. For the late stage of T2, according to the overall facilitation effect of stress on AB, we speculated that there would be two possibilities: (a) if stress enhances neutral stimuli encoding into working memory (Bolton, & Robinson, 2017;Stauble et al, 2013), stress will increase general target processing, that is, the early and late stage will coordinate to improve the AB performance; (b) if stress processes neutral and negative stimuli to the same extent (Kan et al, 2019;Schwabe & Wolf, 2010), stress will generate a dissociable effect on the early and late-stage processing of AB, namely early selective attention processing will improve, but late working memory consolidation will not be sensitive to stress. This would indicate that the contribution of stress in reducing AB mainly comes from the early stage.…”

The impact of advertising creativity, warning-based appeals and green dispositions on the attentional effectiveness of environmental advertisements

“…To demystify such inattention that can accompany attentional selection, the "attentional blink" concept has been developed, which captures the negative impact of previously attended targets on subsequent targets that appear within 200-500 ms. Using a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) task, wherein a stream of stimuli including two targets and various distractors are rapidly displayed, Raymond et al (1992) were the first to find that individuals often fail to report a second target (T2) that is presented shortly after a first target (T1) that has been immediately and correctly identified, especially when the temporal delay between the two targets is within 200-500 ms (see also Kan et al, 2019). Although many recent studies have examined the cognitive mechanisms underpinning the attentional blink (e.g., Kan et al, 2019;Tang et al, 2020;Trutti et al, 2019), no research appears to have examined this effect in the fields of advertising or environmental psychology.…”