Emotional Modulation of the Attentional Blink by Pleasant and Unpleasant Pictures

Abstract

When shown a rapid series of images, attention to a second target that follows in short proximity to a first is diminished--a phenomenon sometimes called an "attentional blink." Three experiments compared detection of motivationally relevant pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral pictures when they appeared as the second target following a neutral (Experiment 1), unpleasant (Experiment 2) and pleasant (Experiment 3) picture target. The second target followed at lags of 2, 3 or 8 pictures. In all three experiments, detection of neutral pictures was reduced at lags 2 and 3, indicative of an attentional blink. In contrast, unpleasant pictures were detected more than neutral pictures at lags 2 and 3. Unexpectedly, pleasant pictures not only resisted the attentional blink, but they were detected substantially more than other pictures at all lags in all three experiments. Overall, the experiments support the idea that motivationally relevant stimuli preferentially capture attention more than motivationally neutral stimuli.

Attentional Modulation of Emotional Conflict Processing with Flanker Tasks

“…Faces in the left visual field were missed less often than oval shapes and patients extinguished positive and negative expressions much less than neutral expressions. These findings suggest that emotional stimuli captured attention more easily than faces and objects [71]. Therefore processing of emotional expressions and faces (e.g., gender identity) was influenced by attention to a lesser degree in comparison to processing of neutral stimuli, because their salience helps to gain priority in bottom-up processing.…”

Startle effects on saccadic responses to emotional target stimuli

“…This effect can be demonstrated with various behavioral paradigms such as the emotional Stroop task (Dresler, Meriau, Heekeren, & van der Meer, 2009), the dot probe task (Koster, Crombez, Verschuere, & De Houwer, 2004;Miyazawa & Iwasaki, 2009) or the go/no-go task (De Houwer & Tibboel, 2010). However, while mainly negative, threatening stimuli were initially considered to be preferentially processed (Ito, Larsen, Smith, & Cacioppo, 1998), recent studies suggest that the effect is based more on stimulus arousal than valence (de Oca, Villa, Cervantes, & Welbourne, 2012;McConnell & Shore, 2011;Most, Smith, Cooter, Levy, & Zald, 2007;Sheth & Pham, 2008;Vogt, De Houwer, Koster, Van Damme, & Crombez, 2008). Additionally, several state and trait variables exert an influence on this attentional engagement.…”

Interference of Emotional Information in Briefly Presented Scene Arrays

“…There is a preponderance of evidence supporting the notion that emotional information is selected automatically without the need for attention (Anderson, Christoff, Panitz, Rosa, & Gabrieli, 2003;Bradley, Keil, & Lang, 2012;Oca, Villa, Cervantes, & Welbourne, 2012;Pessoa, Padmala, & Morland, 2005;Schupp, Junghöfer, Weike, & Hamm, 2003) and that attention is preferentially allocated to emotional events even when those stimuli are not consciously perceived (Anticevic, Barch, & Repovs, 2010;Calvo, Nummenmaa, & Hyönä, 2008;Kalanthroff, Cohen, & Henik, 2013;Padmala, Bauer, & Pessoa, 2011). For example, an emotional event is more likely to permeate consciousness as documented through paradigms such as inattentional blindness (Mack & Rock, 1998;New & German, 2014;Wiemer, Gerdes, & Pauli, 2013), attentional blink (Choisdealbha, Piech, Fuller, & Zald, 2017;Most, Chun, Widders, & Zald, 2005;Oca et al, 2012), or continuous flash suppression (Yang, Zald, & Blake, 2007), demonstrating a privileged status of emotional information in visual attention.…”

“…In other words, attention is effectively captured by a distracting, task-irrel-evant emotional event, and causes attentional disengagement from the originally attended task (Gupta, Hur, & Lavie, 2016;Nummenmaa, Hyönä, & Calvo, 2006). An emotional event presented prior to, simultaneously with, or even after a neutral event disrupts processing of other neutral events, which has been attributed to an instinctive and involuntary attentional shift toward those emotional events (Becker, 2012;Choisdealbha et al, 2017;Fernández-Martín & Calvo, 2016;Krug & Carter, 2012;Öhman, Flykt, & Esteves, 2001;Oca et al, 2012;Sakaki, Gorlick, & Mather, 2011). Likewise, eye movement studies illustrate that initial fixations are more likely to land on emotional information (Adolphs, Tranel, & Buchanan, 2015;Calvo & Lang, 2005), and that semantic details of emotional information can be picked up even in peripheral vision (Bocanegra & Zeelenberg, 2009;Calvo et al, 2008).…”