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.

Keywords: Attentional blink; Attentional capture; Divided attention; Inattention.

Figure 1.

An outline of anticipated results. In the typical EAB paradigm, an impairment in target performance is observed when an emotional distractor is presented close in time to the target (A). If this impairment is the result of an overinvestment of limited attentional resources toward the emotional distractor, similar to that observed in the AB, then the induction of a diffuse attentional state via the introduction of a peripheral monitoring task should alleviate the EAB (B). However, given that the EAB is the result of involuntary attentional capture prior to a target rather than voluntary attention allocation as in the AB, is also possible that the introduction of a concurrent task will have no effect (C) or may even worsen task performance by increasing demands (D).

Figure 2.

Participants discriminated the clockwise or counterclockwise rotation of the target landscape image presented in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) of upright landscape images. An irrelevant emotional (erotic) or neutral distractor preceded the target by two or eight frames. In separate experimental blocks, attention to the RSVP was manipulated based on task instructions to ignore or also attend to the peripherally presented dots.

Figure 3.

The proportion of correct responses (top row) and average vividness ratings (bottom row) for the target are plotted as a function of distractor-target lag, distractor valence, and task. Ratings were assigned ordinal values: 1 = No Experience (No Exp), 2 = Brief glimpse (Brief), 3 = Almost clear experience (Almost), and 4 = Clear experience (Clear Exp). Error bars represent the standard error of the mean (SEM).

Figure 4.

A) The average proportion of correct target responses for each confidence rating for each distractor valence and lag. Error bars represent the standard error of the mean (SEM). B) The proportion of responses for each vividness rating is plotted as a function of attention task for each distractor valence (Neutral, top row; Emotional, bottom row) and lag (columns).