Testing a goal-driven account of involuntary attentional capture by threat.

Abstract

Testing a goaldriven account of involuntary attentional capture by threat Article (Accepted Version) http://sro.sussex.ac.uk Brown, Chris R H, Berggren, Nick and Forster, Sophie (2019) Testing a goal-driven account of involuntary attentional capture by threat. Emotion.

Monetary and non-monetary rewards reduce attentional capture by emotional distractors

“…Less is known, however, about how motivation influences control when distractors are emotional. Biased attention to emotional stimuli occurs via both salience-driven (Carretié, 2014;Mulckhuyse, 2018;Öhman et al, 2001) and goal-driven mechanisms (Brown et al, 2019;Mohanty & Sussman, 2013), and there may even be specific neural pathways dedicated to emotional attention (Pourtois et al, 2013;Vuilleumier, 2015). Moreover, responding to emotional stimuli is often crucial for survival (LeDoux, 2012), and so ignoring unexpected emotional stimuli could be dangerous or costly.…”

Not looking for any trouble? Purely affective attentional settings do not induce goal-driven attentional capture

“…On the other hand, one of our recent investigations found that although searching for threatening animal targets produced goal-driven capture by threatening animal distractors, this effect did not generalize to another form of threat-fearful faces did not capture attention during search for threatening animals (Brown et al, 2019). This could suggest an important limitation to the ability of purely affective categories to capture attention, which would have key implications for both understanding attentional capture by threat and predicting the extent of goal-driven influences on involuntary attention in daily life.…”

“…Indeed, the idea that attentional biases towards threat may be due to an intentional vigilance has been raised in early models of anxiety (e.g., Wells & Matthews, 1994). We note, however, that our previous demonstrations of goal-driven capture by motivationally relevant stimuli have been limited to single conceptual categories (e.g., threatening animals or negative smoking images; Brown et al, 2019;Brown, Forster, et al, 2018b). One question which remains, therefore, is whether or not goal-driven attentional capture can be elicited in response to a general affective goal (e.g., threat detection), and generalize across multiple subcategories of threat (e.g., threatening objects, threat-related vehicles, threat-related faces).…”

“…Adapting the contingent capture paradigm of Wyble et al (2013), we have demonstrated that involuntary attentional capture effects for certain categories 1 of motivationally relevant stimuli, such as threatening animals, emotional faces, alcohol, and rewarding and aversive smoking cues can be experimentally induced when participants are asked to adopt a search goal for these categories. Such findings raise the possibility that the phenomenon of involuntary attentional capture by threat might conceivably reflect a goal-driven mechanism (Brown, Berggren, & Forster, 2019;Brown, Duka, & Forster, 2018a;Brown, Forster, & Duka, 2018b).…”

Monetary and non-monetary reward reduces attentional capture by emotional distractors.

“…Less is known, however, about how motivation influences control when distractors are emotional. Biased attention to emotional stimuli occurs via both salience-driven (Carretié, 2014;Mulckhuyse, 2018;Öhman, Flykt, & Esteves, 2001) and goal-driven mechanisms (Brown, Berggren, & Forster, 2019;Mohanty & Sussman, 2013), and there may even be specific neural pathways dedicated to emotional attention (Pourtois et al, 2013;Vuilleumier, 2015). Moreover, responding to emotional stimuli is often crucial for survival (LeDoux, 2012), and so ignoring unexpected emotional stimuli could be dangerous or costly.…”