Don't look back: Retroactive, dynamic costs and benefits of emotional capture

Abstract

When people search for targets within rapid streams of images, irrelevant emotional distractors—relative to neutral distractors—spontaneously demand attention and impair subsequent target detection, an effect that can be likened to an emotion-induced “attentional blink”. But what happens when emotional distractors appear after a target has already come and gone? Here, we describe new findings of retroactive emotion-induced effects on target awareness. First, emotion-induced impairments of target awareness extended even to targets that appeared immediately before emotional distractors (Experiment 1). Second, when targets preceded distractors by two items—rather than by one item—negative distractors led to enhanced target processing relative to when distractors were neutral (Experiment 2). In contrast, when a target appeared after an emotional distractor, target awareness was impaired regardless of whether it was the first or second subsequent item. These results potentially implicate separable impacts of emotion on target processing, which can be distinguished by their facilitatory versus disruptive effects and by their temporal dynamics.

Acknowledgements

We thank Marvin Chun, Kim Curby, Jim Hoffman, Helene Intraub, Anna Papafragou, Paul Quinn, Nick Turk-Browne, and members of the University of Delaware cognitive brown-bag series for helpful comments and discussion.

Notes

¹The fact that accuracies were highest in this condition is likely due to the fact that scrambled pictures, being mere jumbles of colours and features, respresented less of a category shift within the stream than did either negative or neutral distractors.

²This emotion-induced enhancement at Lag-minus-2 did not cause performance to differ significantly from that in the scrambled-negative condition, t(31) = 0.46, p=.645, though this might be due to a ceiling effect. Future experiments may find that when performance is lowered from ceiling levels, emotion-induced enhancements at Lag-minus-2 boost accuracy above baseline; otherwise, one conclusion might be that such emotion-induced enhancements lie superimposed upon global impairments caused by the mere presence of a meaningful distractor.