When emotion blinds: a spatiotemporal competition account of emotion-induced blindness

Abstract

Emotional visual scenes are such powerful attractors of attention that they can disrupt perception of other stimuli that appear soon afterward, an effect known as emotion-induced blindness. What mechanisms underlie this impact of emotion on perception? Evidence suggests that emotion-induced blindness may be distinguishable from closely related phenomena such as the orienting of spatial attention to emotional stimuli or the central resource bottlenecks commonly associated with the attentional blink. Instead, we suggest that emotion-induced blindness reflects relatively early competition between targets and emotional distractors, where spontaneous prioritization of emotional stimuli leads to suppression of competing perceptual representations potentially linked to an overlapping point in time and space.

Keywords: attention; biased competition; emotion; emotion-induced blindness; perception; spatiotemporal competition; visual awareness.

Figure 1

(A) Example of part of a typical emotion-induced blindness trial, where items are presented serially at a rate of 100 ms/item. Here, the target is a landscape picture rotated 90° clockwise. The critical distractor is an emotionally negative picture that appears two items before the target (Lag 2). (B) A typical pattern of data (means and standard errors) from an emotion-induced blindness experiment (from Most et al., , Experiment 1). At Lag 2, accuracy in reporting the target’s orientation was worse following emotional distractors than following neutral or scrambled distractors. However, by Lag 8, performance in all distractor conditions had recovered to above 90% accuracy.