Reduced habituation to angry faces: increased attentional capture as to override inhibition of return

Abstract

The aim of this paper was to study whether real angry faces do capture attention to the extent of overcoming the inhibition of return (IOR) effect and whether the anxiety level of participants modulates this effect by stressing biases toward threatening stimuli. With this purpose, participants categorized the emotional valence of face targets in a standard spatial cueing procedure suitable to measure IOR. In Experiment 1, participants were selected according to their high vs. low-trait anxiety, whereas in Experiment 2 participants were induced a positive vs. anxiety mood state. The typical IOR effect was observed with neutral and happy face targets, which disappeared with angry face targets. Similar results were observed for all anxiety groups and in both experiments. The results indicate that IOR is overridden when the target is a biologically relevant angry face, as highly relevant targets should suffer less from habituation to attentional capture regardless of anxiety. We suggest that these data show that attentional capture is less likely to habituate for threatening information, so that no cost is measured in detecting new threatening information appearing at recently cued locations.

Hazard levels of warning signal words modulate the inhibition of return effect: evidence from the event-related potential P300

“…Our findings are supported by previous studies that used a cueing paradigm to examine what type of stimulus could override the IOR effect (Baijal and Srinivasan 2011;Dai and Feng 2009;Fox et al 2002;Pérez-Dueñas et al 2014;Verkuil et al 2009). They found that some emotional stimuli could modulate the IOR effect.…”

“…For instance, using schematic facial expressions as target stimuli in a detection task, Baijal and Srinivasan (2011) found that IOR was reduced for sad faces compared to happy ones. Pérez-Dueñas et al (2014) observed an elimination of the IOR effect when the target was a biologically relevant angry face. These studies examined the influence of emotion on the IOR effect in an explicit way by using emotional stimuli as targets, and the results were consistent with the evolutionary perspective that more attention is captured by emotionally negative stimuli.…”

“…Many previous studies have used a cueing paradigm to investigate whether the IOR effect can be influenced by the emotional valence of stimuli. It has been demonstrated that naturalistic angry faces (Dai and Feng 2009;Pérez-Dueñas et al 2014) or schematically angry faces (Baijal and Srinivasan 2011;Fox et al 2002;Verkuil et al 2009) can eliminate the IOR effect. In the present study, however, the emotional stimuli were warning signal words rather than facial expressions; we also found a modulatory effect of these words on IOR.…”

Social Saliency of the Cue Slows Attention Shifts

“…Allocation of attentional resources is driven by relative salience of stimuli encountered in the environment, where high salience can be generated by the relative configuration of low-level features such as color, orientation and size in the scene (Itti and Koch, 2001; Soltani and Koch, 2010) or by an interaction between sensory features and reward (Markowitz et al, 2011; Theeuwes and Belopolsky, 2012; Khorsand et al, 2015). Similarly, valence of the face cue (e.g., faces with expression of emotion such as fear, happy, neutral, or sad or one’s own face; Pourtois et al, 2013; Pérez-Duenas et al, 2014; Porciello et al, 2014) has been shown to modulate the magnitude of attentional capture. Thus, spatial reallocation of attention in response to gaze shifts in familiar faces could be facilitated by faster processing of the gaze cue or slowed by the social saliency of familiar faces.…”

Inhibition of Return Is Modulated by Negative Stimuli: Evidence from Subliminal Perception

“…However, it is still uncertain that how biological stimuli can modulate IOR effect. Some studies found emotion stimuli can modulate the IOR effect for clinical populations (Fox et al, 2001; Pérez-Dueñas et al, 2014). Other literature measuring the IOR effect of emotional cues or targets, suggests that IOR is a “blindness mechanism” that is not affected by the occurrence of biologically relevant cues and targets (Taylor and Therrien, 2005; Stoyanova et al, 2007; Lange et al, 2008).…”