Manipulations of distractor frequency do not mitigate emotion-induced blindness

Abstract

Emotional distractors can impair perception of subsequently presented targets, a phenomenon called emotion-induced blindness. Do emotional distractors lose their power to disrupt perception when appearing with increased frequency, perhaps due to desensitisation or enhanced recruitment of proactive control? Non-emotional tasks, such as the Stroop, have revealed that high frequency distractors or conflict lead to reduced interference, and distractor frequency appears to modulate attentional capture by emotional distractors in spatial attention tasks. But emotion-induced blindness is thought to reflect perceptual competition between targets and emotional distractors, and it is unclear whether high frequency emotional stimuli cause less disruption at this relatively early stage of processing. In four experiments, participants searched streams of images for a rotated target image. A negative or neutral distractor appeared before the target, and their relative frequency was manipulated. Across all experiments, the frequency of emotional distractors did not modulate emotion-induced blindness even when participants were explicitly informed that they would appear often or seldom. Thus, increased distractor frequency does not appear to mitigate the priority allotted to emotional distractors during perceptual competition.

Contextual Modulation of Emotional Distraction: Attentional Capture and Motivational Significance

“…Different results were observed using a variant of the attentional blink paradigm in which emotional images interrupt processing of a subsequent target image-an effect called "emotioninduced blindness" (Most, 2014). Zhao and Most (2019) found that, in a block where the target was preceded by an emotional distractor in most trials, and only rarely by neutral distractors, participants were as inaccurate as in a block in which emotional distractors were rare and neutral distractors appeared frequently. Thus, these results showed no effect of relative emotional distractor frequency in modulating emotional interference, when absolute distractor frequency was kept constant.…”

“…One hypothesis put forward by the authors, also based on different results (Kennedy, Newman, & Most, 2018), takes into consideration the predictability of the valence of the occurring distractors when distractor content is manipulated within blocks, compared with across blocks. In Zhao and Most's (2019) study, emotional and neutral distractors were intermixed within the same block, making it impossible for the observers to predict the emotionality of the forthcoming distractor and therefore to shield themselves against emotional interference. According to this interpretation, when distractor content is manipulated across blocks, it should, however, be possible to reduce emotional interference, as the content of a distractor is constant and predictable within each block.…”

“…Therefore, one possibility is that emotion-induced blindness, which relies more on temporal attention than on spatial attention as in the present paradigm, is less modulated by contextual factors, such as distractor frequency. We should also consider, however, that in Zhao and Most's (2019) study, the overall distractor frequency was kept constant across conditions and what varied was the relative frequency of emotional compared with neutral distractors. In this regard, the findings of Experiment 2, in which a clear frequency effect was observed despite the specific frequency of emotional distractors was kept constant across the low-and high-frequency blocks, suggest that a critical factor that may prompt efficient filtering is the overall frequency of distractors, rather than the specific frequency of emotional stimuli.…”

Preparing for the Worst: Attention is Enhanced Prior to Any Upcoming Emotional or Neutral Stimulus

“…Only after sufficient experience with the negative stimuli can the interference effect be somewhat reduced (Schmidts, Foerster, Kleinsorge, & Kunde, 2020; see also Cunningham & Egeth, 2016, on the reduction of the attentional white-bear effect over time). Notably, however, the extent to which top-down modulation affects emotional distraction is still debated; some researchers have found that increasing frequency or reward reduces emotional distraction (e.g., Grimshaw, Kranz, Carmel, Moody, & Devue, 2018; Walsh, Carmel, & Grimshaw, 2019), whereas others have not (Zhao & Most, 2019). Thus, it remains to be determined how flexible the mechanisms for preparing for and processing emotional distractors are.…”

Habituation to emotional distractors attenuates emotion-induced blindness.

“…In contrast to the manipulation of the target in the first approach, the second approach aims to reduce the attentional prioritization of emotional distractor. In order to do that, participants are provided with information about the emotional distractors (Kennedy et al, 2018; Zhao & Most, 2018). This allows the participant to proactively inhibit the emotional distractors in subsequent EIB tasks (Kennedy et al, 2018).…”