Dispositional affect predicts temporal attention costs in the attentional blink paradigm

Abstract

Theories suggest that positive affect broadens attention, whereas negative affect focuses attention. This position has been supported by studies showing that positive affect leads to more diffuse spatial attention while negative affect leads to more focused spatial attention. Recently, researchers have used the attentional blink (AB) paradigm to show that induced positive affect may also lead to more diffuse temporal attention, allowing greater accuracy for targets presented within a short time interval. The present study investigated whether dispositional affect could modulate temporal attentional diffusion using the AB paradigm. Consistent with the diffusion hypothesis, greater positive affect was associated with smaller AB magnitude, whereas greater negative affect was associated with larger AB magnitude. Thus, dispositional affect can modulate the costs of attentional selection over brief time intervals.

Keywords:

• Attentional blink
• Attention
• Affect
• Positive
• Negative
• Diffuse

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI), and Ontario Innovation Trust (OIT) to the second author.

We thank Kirk Stokes and Carleen Gicante for their assistance with data collection.

Notes

¹The pattern of zero-order correlations between PA, NA, and AB magnitude observed when averaging across stimulus types were also observed for each of the three stimulus types individually.

²Response bias (β, the willingness to say “yes” to the presence of an X) was not significantly correlated with any of the affect measures and was not examined further.

³Results were consistent even when overall T1 accuracy and T2 sensitivity were included as predictors in the regression models.