The emotional attentional blink is robust to divided attention

Abstract

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.

Emotional distractor images disrupt target processing in a graded manner.

“…To be clear, emotional stimuli (and to a much lesser extent, neutral stimuli) can cause a complete loss of target perception at short lags, as reflected in the elevated nonresponse rate reported in the primary analyses, but this is the fate of only a minority of stimulus representations, with other target representations frequently emerging in weakened form rather than being abolished. This result extends our prior finding of graded subjective percepts in a dual-task EAB paradigm (Keefe et al, 2019) and suggests that emotional images interfere with target processing in a graded manner. That awareness was graded rather than bimodal does not mean that the transition between different states of awareness is completely continuous (with a smooth distribution between all states of awareness).…”

“…The critical distractor was displayed as either the fifth or seventh stimulus in the stream and was either a neutral-valence image of everyday interactions of people or an emotionally salient erotic image. We selected erotic images as distractors because they cause a potent EAB response (Ciesielski et al, 2010; Keefe et al, 2019; Most et al, 2007; Olatunji et al, 2011) and can be reasonably matched perceptually with neutral images of people because of shared perceptual features such as faces. The target consisted of a landscape/architectural scene rotated 90° clockwise or counterclockwise from vertical.…”

“…Participants were informed of the nature of the visual stimuli they would be viewing. This sample size was chosen based on previous studies demonstrating a large effect of erotic images on target-discrimination accuracy in the EAB (Ciesielski et al, 2010; Keefe et al, 2019; Most et al, 2007; Olatunji et al, 2011).…”

“…First, we tested whether subjective awareness of targets following emotional distractors displays a bimodal (i.e., seen or not seen) pattern reflecting all-or-none processing or is characterized by more graded declines in the subjective vividness of targets. In a recent dual-task EAB paradigm, we observed that participants reported a continuum of target-vividness ratings when a target was preceded by an emotional distractor (Keefe, Sy, Tong, & Zald, 2019). This continuous, rather than bimodal, distribution of target-vividness ratings suggests that emotional distractors influence target processing in a graded manner.…”

“…This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. (Keefe et al, 2019), we hypothesized that the distribution of subjective vividness ratings would include many intermediate ratings and would parallel accuracy. More specifically, we predicted that subjects' ratings of target vividness should vary as a function of the temporal proximity of the target and emotional distractor, with less vivid target percepts emerging at shorter lags and following emotional distractors-even when subjects were able to detect the presence of a target.…”