Arousal (but not valence) amplifies the impact of salience

ABSTRACT

Previous findings indicate that negative arousal enhances bottom-up attention biases favouring perceptual salient stimuli over less salient stimuli. The current study tests whether those effects were driven by emotional arousal or by negative valence by comparing how well participants could identify visually presented letters after hearing either a negative arousing, positive arousing or neutral sound. On each trial, some letters were presented in a high contrast font and some in a low contrast font, creating a set of targets that differed in perceptual salience. Sounds rated as more emotionally arousing led to more identification of highly salient letters but not of less salient letters, whereas sounds’ valence ratings did not impact salience biases. Thus, arousal, rather than valence, is a key factor enhancing visual processing of perceptually salient targets.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotional arousal
• visual salience
• valence
• individual differences

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Institute on Aging (NIH) [grant number RO1AG025340].