Foraging through emotions: emotional stimuli and participants' trait anxiety shape visual foraging

Abstract

Previous work suggests that target selection during visual foraging is achieved through competition between different factors (e.g. proximity, priming, value) that orient attention towards one of the possible targets. However, this research has mainly involved simple stimuli such as coloured dots. Here, we investigated whether target selection is sensitive to the emotional content of the stimuli during visual foraging, using real-world photographs eliciting negative, neutral or positive emotions. Moreover, based on results from single-target visual search, we examined how participants' trait anxiety influences foraging behaviour. Seventy-five observers completed three foraging tasks corresponding to three emotional-valence conditions (positive, neutral, negative). The task was to select all the targets (pre-specified emotional images) as fast as possible while ignoring neutral distractors. Observers' foraging strategy (i.e. selection order, number of switches between target types) and performance (i.e. selection times, number of distractor selections) were measured. We also assessed participants' trait anxiety. The results revealed that negative emotional stimuli significantly influenced both foraging strategy and performance. Furthermore, the effect of negative emotion on foraging performance was amplified for participants with high trait anxiety. These findings suggest that emotional characteristics of both targets and participants contribute to target selection during visual foraging.

Keywords: attention; emotion; target selection; trait anxiety; visual foraging; visual search.

Figure 1.

Visual foraging task. T1 and T2 represent the two target images, and D1 and D2 the two distractor images. In line with the recommendations of Lang et al. [7], we do not reproduce IAPS images in print. T1, T2, D1 and D2 correspond to the images used in the positive, neutral and negative blocks (interested readers may refer to the IAPS ID numbers listed in §2.2). The positions of targets and distractors were randomly and independently assigned on each trial.

Figure 2.

Foraging strategy as a function of target emotional valence. Results are shown for (A) the number of runs and (B) inter-target distance.

Figure 3.

Foraging performance as a function of target emotional valence. Results are shown for (A) inter-target times and (B) switch costs.

Figure 4.

Relationship between trait anxiety score and (A,B) foraging strategy or (C,D) performance in the negative block. The black lines show linear fits with 95% confidence intervals.