Affective stimuli capture attention regardless of categorical distinctiveness: An emotion-induced blindness study

Abstract

Affective stimuli capture attention, whether their affective value stems from emotional content or a history of reward. The uniqueness of such stimuli within their experimental contexts might imbue them with an enhanced categorical distinctiveness that accounts for their impact on attention. Indeed, in emotion-induced blindness, categorically distinctive neutral pictures disrupt target perception, albeit to a lesser degree than do emotional pictures. Here, we manipulated the categorical distinctiveness of distractors in an emotion-induced blindness task. Participants searched within RSVP streams for a target that followed an emotional or a neutral distractor picture. In a categorically homogenous condition, all non-distractor items were exemplars from a uniform category, thus enhancing the distractor's categorical distinctiveness. In a categorically heterogeneous condition, each non-distractor item represented a distinct category. Neutral distractors disrupted target perception only in the homogenous condition, but emotional distractors did so regardless of their categorical distinctiveness.

Keywords:

• Emotion-induced blindness
• Reward-driven capture
• Attentional capture
• Categorization

Thanks to Lingling Wang, Mandy Skoranski, and Kyle Dobson for helpful discussion on this project.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

This work was supported by NIH [grant number R03MH091526-01] and ARC [grant number FT120100707] to SBM.

Thanks to Lingling Wang, Mandy Skoranski, and Kyle Dobson for helpful discussion on this project.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

This work was supported by NIH [grant number R03MH091526-01] and ARC [grant number FT120100707] to SBM.

Notes

¹ We attempted to replicate these findings in a within-subjects design, with participants receiving two blocks each of heterogeneous and homogeneous conditions (interleaved to minimize differences in practice across conditions). However, this design did not elicit differences in performance between the homogeneous and heterogeneous conditions; instead, in both conditions, negative distractors impaired target accuracy more than neutral distractors, and neutral distractors impaired target accuracy more than baseline distractors. We then reran the between-subjects version described in the main text, which successfully replicated our initial results. It seems likely that carryover effects stemming from the within-subjects, interleaved manipulation of condition interfered with differences in strategy that participants would otherwise employ when faced with the homogeneous and heterogeneous streams. See Appendix for more details regarding the methods and results of this replication experiment (which also served to verify the effect across universities in the USA and Australia).