The naked truth: Positive, arousing distractors impair rapid target perception

Abstract

Emotional stimuli tend to capture and hold attention more than non-emotional stimuli do. Aversive pictures have been found to impair perception of visual targets even after the emotional information has disappeared. The benefits of such interlinked emotion and attention systems have sometimes been discussed within an evolutionary framework, with a survival advantage attributed to early detection of threatening stimuli. However, consistent with recent suggestions that attention is drawn to arousing stimuli regardless of whether they are positive or negative, the current investigation found that erotic distractors—generally rated as both pleasing and arousing—consistently elicited a transient “emotion-induced blindness” similar to that caused by aversive distractors (Experiment 1). This effect persisted despite performance-based monetary incentives to ignore the distractors (Experiment 2), and following attentional manipulations that reduced interference from aversive images (Experiment 3). The findings indicate that positively arousing stimuli can spontaneously cause emotion-induced deficits in visual processing, just as aversive stimuli can.

Notes

¹The complexity of all critical distractors in this experiment was limited by the fact that each distractor depicted only one or two people. Although we did not explicitly match for low-level features such as luminance or colour, our previous report on responses to negative stimuli incorporated scrambled pictures and demonstrated that emotional effects within this paradigm cannot be attributed to such low-level features (Most et al., 2005). This appears to be the case here as well: for example, pictures of nude females impaired target perception far more than did pictures of clothed females even though the average luminance of the clothed females was greater, as assessed by their mean luminance value using the histogram function in Adobe Photoshop CS (Adobe Systems Inc., San Jose, CA). In contrast, the nude pictures in Experiments 2 and 3 had greater mean luminosity than the neutral pictures, but they again caused a larger attentional blink. Taken together, the evidence suggests no systematic relationship between such low-level features and the emotion-induced effect.

²Stimuli included 39 negative IAPS images (valence = 1.85, SD=0.43; arousal = 6.34, SD=0.63).

³Note that we cannot rule out the possibility that some female subjects in the main experiment had a similarly negative response to erotic pictures as the one female outlier among our raters. However, to anticipate the results, the decrement in performance was robust across subjects, such that the results could not simply reflect a response from one or two females who might have rated the erotica as unpleasant, had such participants been present in the experimental sample at all. Among the independent raters, men overwhelmingly rated erotic pictures as positive, and women generally did so as well, albeit with lesser enthusiasm. No participants in the attentional blink part of the study volunteered that they found the erotica unpleasant during debriefing.