What you see is what you want to see: Motivationally relevant stimuli can interrupt current resource allocation

ABSTRACT

Arousing stimuli, either threat-related or pleasant, may be selected for priority at different stages within the processing stream. Here we examine the pattern of processing for non-task-relevant threatening (spiders: arousing to some) and pleasant stimuli (babies or chocolate: arousing to all) by recording the gaze of a spider Fearful and Non-fearful group while they performed a simple “follow the cross” task. There was no difference in first saccade latencies. Saccade trajectories showed a general hypervigilance for all stimuli in the Fearful group. Saccade landing positions corresponded to what each group would find arousing, such that the Fearful group deviated towards both types of images whereas the Non-fearful group deviated towards pleasant images. Secondary corrective saccade latencies away from threat-related stimuli were longer for the Fearful group (difficulty in disengaging) compared with the Non-fearful group. These results suggest that attentional biases towards arousing stimuli may occur at different processing stages.

KEYWORDS:

• Attention
• eye movements
• arousal
• spiders
• biases

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹No impact of participant group and image type was found on initial saccade latencies [Fearful participants: Control, 253 (7); Spider, 250 (7); Pleasant, 253 (7); Non-Fearful participants: Control, 259 (6); Spider 259 (8); Pleasant 258 (7); all Latencies are in milliseconds with standard errors shown in brackets], with a two-way ANOVA (image by group as factors) showing all F's < 1.