Count on arousal: introducing a new method for investigating the effects of emotional valence and arousal on visual search performance

Abstract

There is a large body of research, indicating that threatening stimuli with evolutionary history are prioritised in visual processing. It has been proposed that all threatening stimuli are prioritised, irrespective of evolutionary age, but it was argued that the method used to produce the results was not suitable for investigating the phenomenon. We present a new visual search task and provide evidence that it is an appropriate tool for future research. In Experiment 1, we investigated how the influence of emotional stimuli on visual search performance varies with valence (negative, positive, and neutral) and arousal (medium and high). Negative valence found to have a greater impact. Furthermore, our results underscore the importance of controlling for arousal. Experiment 2 confirmed these findings and also revealed that negative valence decreases performance by diverting attention away from the task, but arousal can compensate for this by increasing attentional capacity. This mechanism does not seem to be affected by the evolutionary history of the stimulus. In Experiment 3, we reproduced these results using a touchscreen monitor and controlling for variance in low-level visual features. We claim that these results support the notion of preferential processing of threatening cues, regardless of evolutionary origin. However, the level of threat, i.e., how arousing the cue is, has to be taken into account to explain the findings.

Disentangling the facilitating and hindering effects of threat‐related stimuli – A visual search study

“…According to the arousal stimulation effect (Zsido, Bernath, Labadi, & Deak, 2018), although threatening stimuli initially grab the attention leading to reduced performance compared to neutral stimuli, increase in the level of arousal could compensate for the negative effects caused by cognitive resources devoted to task-irrelevant information. That is, a heightened arousal or threat level would result in a speeded reallocation of these resources to the task from the irrelevant distractor while at the same time increasing the availability of cognitive resources by stimulating the cognitive system (see also Meyer, Quaedflieg, Bisby, & Smeets, 2019;€ Ohman, Esteves, Flykt, & Soares, 1993;Reisenzein, 1994;Sakaki, Niki, & Mather, 2012;Trick, Brandigampola, & Enns, 2012;Zinchenko, Geyer, M€ uller, & Conci, 2019).…”

“…We adopted a visual number finding task from a previous study (Zsido, Bernath, Labadi, & Deak, 2018) where threatening or neutral images were presented as background pictures and different number matrices as foreground. Participants had to find the numbers in ascending order, and their performance was measured, that is the last number they found during a given time.…”

“…Their mean age was 21.08 (SD = 2.56). The sample size for this experiment was determined by computing estimated statistical power (b > .8), based on a previous study (Zsido, Bernath, Labadi, & Deak, 2018) using a similar paradigm. The participants completed the short version of the Snake Questionnaire (Zsido, 2017;Zsido, Arato, Inhof, Janszky, & Darnai, 2018).…”

An incremental dual-task paradigm to investigate pain attenuation by task difficulty, affective content and threat value

“…The affective content can affect observers’ emotional and arousal states, and subsequently bias their attention to such stimuli rather than recruit attentional resources per se . In line with this, it has been shown that images with negative valence affects visual-search performance (e.g., [ 37 ]). Similarly, there is evidence that images with different affective content (e.g., positive versus negative valence images) affect perceived pain intensity of different types of noxious stimulation (e.g., [ 2 – 3 , 38 – 39 ]; for a review see [ 13 ]).…”

A Bottom-Up Validation of the IAPS, GAPED, and NAPS Affective Picture Databases: Differential Effects on Behavioral Performance

“…Extensive literature has examined the link between affective information and cognition and has shown how affective stimuli can directly modulate cognitive performance through bottom-up processes such as attention orientating, and consequently memory ( Murphy and Isaacowitz, 2008 ; Talmi et al, 2008 ; Brenner et al, 2014 ; Padulo et al, 2020 ). More specifically, the boost in sensory processing for emotionally salient events ( Vuilleumier, 2002 , 2005 ), enhances attention toward them and/or alters attention toward other concomitant stimuli ( Dennis and Chen, 2007 ; Bocanegra and Zeelenberg, 2009 ; Vuilleumier and Huang, 2009 ) and ultimately leads to more efficient encoding and consolidation in memory.…”