Emotion-induced blindness reflects competition at early and late processing stages: An ERP study

Kennedy, Briana L.; Rawding, Jennifer; Most, Steven B.; Hoffman, James E.

doi:10.3758/s13415-014-0303-x

Cited by 52 publications

(84 citation statements)

References 41 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Specifically, in contrast to studies demonstrating that emotional stimuli capture attention to their location, in EIB target perception is worse at the location of the emotional distractor (e.g., Most & Wang 2011). This pattern has led to suggestions that emotional distractors compete for neural representation with targets that appear in the same receptive field (Wang et al 2012; also see Keysers & Perrett 2002), a suggestion consistent with findings that neural responses to targets and emotional distractors exhibit a trading relationship (Kennedy et al 2014). Because people tend to prioritize emotional information, it is the emotional distractors that win, an effect that seems to be modulated by mood (Most et al 2010).…”

Section: Representation Of Affect In Sensory Cortexmentioning

confidence: 55%

Cognition does not affect perception: Evaluating the evidence for “top-down” effects

Firestone¹,

Scholl²

2015

Behav Brain Sci

780

764

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract:What determines what we see? In contrast to the traditional "modular" understanding of perception, according to which visual processing is encapsulated from higher-level cognition, a tidal wave of recent research alleges that states such as beliefs, desires, emotions, motivations, intentions, and linguistic representations exert direct, top-down influences on what we see. There is a growing consensus that such effects are ubiquitous, and that the distinction between perception and cognition may itself be unsustainable. We argue otherwise: None of these hundreds of studies -either individually or collectively -provides compelling evidence for true top-down effects on perception, or "cognitive penetrability." In particular, and despite their variety, we suggest that these studies all fall prey to only a handful of pitfalls. And whereas abstract theoretical challenges have failed to resolve this debate in the past, our presentation of these pitfalls is empirically anchored: In each case, we show not only how certain studies could be susceptible to the pitfall (in principle), but also how several alleged top-down effects actually are explained by the pitfall (in practice). Moreover, these pitfalls are perfectly general, with each applying to dozens of other top-down effects. We conclude by extracting the lessons provided by these pitfalls into a checklist that future work could use to convincingly demonstrate top-down effects on visual perception. The discovery of substantive top-down effects of cognition on perception would revolutionize our understanding of how the mind is organized; but without addressing these pitfalls, no such empirical report will license such exciting conclusions.

show abstract

Section: Representation Of Affect In Sensory Cortexmentioning

confidence: 55%

Cognition does not affect perception: Evaluating the evidence for “top-down” effects

Firestone¹,

Scholl²

2015

Behav Brain Sci

780

764

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…One participant was excluded from the analyses because he reported ignoring the spatial cue in the cued-attention task. This sample size was chosen on the basis of previous studies probing similar effects of diffuse-attention manipulations (Arend et al, 2006;Olivers & Nieuwenhuis, 2006;Wierda et al, 2010) and previous studies of the EAB (Kennedy, Rawding, Most, & Hoffman, 2014;Most et al, 2005;Most et al, 2007;Smith, Most, Newsome, & Zald, 2006), ranging from 11 to 24 participants.…”

Section: Participantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The emotional attentional blink is robust to divided attention

Keefe

Tong

et al. 2018

Atten Percept Psychophys

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The emotional attentional blink (EAB) refers to a temporary impairment in the ability to identify a target when it is preceded by an emotional distractor. It is thought to occur because the emotional salience of the distractor exogenously captures attention for a brief duration, rendering the target unattended and preventing it from reaching awareness. Here we tested the extent to which the EAB can be attenuated by inducing a diffuse top-down attentional state, which has been shown to improve target identification in an analogous attentional phenomenon, the attentional blink. Rapid sequences of landscape images were presented centrally, and participants reported the orientation of a ± 90°rotation of a landscape target. To induce a diffuse state of attention, participants were given a secondary task of monitoring for the appearance of a colored dot in the periphery. We found that emotional distractors impaired target recognition performance to comparable extents, regardless of whether or not participants concurrently performed the peripheral-monitoring task. Moreover, we found that performance of the secondary task led to an impaired ability to ignore neutral distractors. Subjective ratings of target vividness mirrored the behavioral accuracy, with frequent reports of intermediate levels of vividness suggesting that the EAB might impair target visibility in a graded manner. Our results demonstrate that the EAB is robust to manipulations of top-down attention, suggesting that the temporary capture of attention by emotionally salient stimuli involves processes that are distinct from those that produce the attentional blink.

show abstract

“…Recently, in an EEG ERP study, Kennedy et al (2014) showed that EIB shows the same ERP markers as AB, suggesting that the mechanisms involved in AB and EIB are similar. They call for further investigations to show that these overlaps indicate that both AB and EIB are very similar mechanism.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotion Induced Blindness Is More Sensitive to Changes in Arousal As Compared to Valence of the Emotional Distractor

Singh

Sunny

2017

Front. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Emotion Induced Blindness (EIB) refers to the impairment in the identification of a neutral target image that follows a threatening or fearful distractor image. It has been suggested that valence plays a significant role in driving the perceptual impairment in EIB. Recent findings from the literature suggest that arousal has a very important role in biasing early cognitive functions. Hence, in the present study, we systematically investigate the role of valence (Experiment 1) and arousal (Experiment 2) in determining the impairment in EIB. The results suggest that when valence is controlled for, the stimuli with higher arousal level lead to greater impairment in target detection. Moreover, under high arousal condition, both positive and negative stimuli lead to significantly greater impairment in target detection. Present study suggests that impairment in EIB is sensitive to the arousal component of the emotional image as compared to valence. The arousal biased competition account that explains the effect of arousal on cognitive processing can sufficiently explains the current results.

show abstract

Emotion-induced blindness reflects competition at early and late processing stages: An ERP study

Cited by 52 publications

References 41 publications

Cognition does not affect perception: Evaluating the evidence for “top-down” effects

Cognition does not affect perception: Evaluating the evidence for “top-down” effects

The emotional attentional blink is robust to divided attention

Emotion Induced Blindness Is More Sensitive to Changes in Arousal As Compared to Valence of the Emotional Distractor

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About