Abstract
In visual search, previous work has shown that negative stimuli narrow the focus of attention and speed reaction times (RTs). This paper investigates these two effects by first asking whether negative emotional stimuli narrow the focus of attention to reduce the learning of a display context in a contextual cueing task and, second, whether exposure to negative stimuli also reduces RTs in inefficient search tasks. In Experiment 1, participants viewed either negative or neutral images (faces or scenes) prior to a contextual cueing task. In a typical contextual cueing experiment, RTs are reduced if displays are repeated across the experiment compared with novel displays that are not repeated. The results showed that a smaller contextual cueing effect was obtained after participants viewed negative stimuli than when they viewed neutral stimuli. However, in contrast to previous work, overall search RTs were not faster after viewing negative stimuli (Experiments 2 to 4). The findings are discussed in terms of the impact of emotional content on visual processing and the ability to use scene context to help facilitate search.
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The authors would like to thank Aashni Bhansali, Anisa Noon, Kaneesha Bose, Oliver Stoney, Daniela Mackie, Phillippa Harrison, and Anna Heinen for their assistance with data collection. The authors would also like to thank Anders Flykt and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments.
Notes
1 We would like to thank Anders Flykt for this suggestion.
2 Past work in the literature has used either scene or face pictures to investigate the effect of emotion on attention (e.g., Pacheco-Unguetti et al., Citation2010, and Olatunji et al., Citation2011, respectively). Therefore, we used both types of stimuli in Experiment 1.However, as the results suggest that there was no difference in the type of negative stimuli used, in Experiments 2 to 4 we used only face stimuli to manipulate emotion.
3 Two seconds was still more than enough time for participants to process each stimulus. Previous studies have shown that emotional effects of negative stimuli can occur with presentation durations as short as 100 ms for each negative stimulus (e.g., Olatunji et al., Citation2011).
4 As an objective measure of variation, the standard deviation in the 500-ms fear condition (set size 12 to match that of Olatunji et al.'s, 2011, work) here was 256 ms versus 120 ms in Olatunji et al.'s work.