scholarly journals Not Looking for Any Trouble? Purely Affective Attentional Settings Do Not Induce Goal-Driven Attentional Capture

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Robert Harrison Brown ◽  
Nick Berggren ◽  
Sophie Forster
Keyword(s):  
Attentional Capture ◽  
Visual Presentation ◽  
Attentional Biases ◽  
Threat Detection ◽  
Conceptual Category ◽  
Stimulus Property ◽  
Fearful Faces ◽  
Specific Goal ◽  
Partial Overlap ◽  
Task Irrelevant

It is well established that directing goal-driven attention to a particular stimulus property (e.g. red), or a conceptual category (e.g. toys) can induce powerful involuntary capture by goal-matching stimuli. Here we tested whether broad affective search goals (e.g. for anything threat-related) could similarly induce a generalised capture to an entire matching affective category. Across four experiments, participants were instructed to search for threat-related images in a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) stream, while ignoring threat-related distractors presented in task-irrelevant locations. Across these experiments we found no evidence of goal-driven attentional capture by threat distractors when participants adopted a general ‘threat detection’ goal encompassing multiple sub-categories of threat (Experiments 1a, 1b). This was true even when there was partial overlap between the threat distractors and the search goal (i.e. subset of the targets matched the distractor; Experiment 2). However, when participants adopted a more specific goal for a single sub-category of threat (e.g. fearful faces), robust goal-driven capture occurred by distractors matching this sub-category (Experiment 3). These findings suggest that while affective criteria can be used in the guidance of attention, attentional settings based on affective properties alone may not induce goal-driven attentional capture. We discuss implications for recent goal-driven accounts of affective attentional biases.

Visual disgust-elicitors produce an attentional blink independent of contextual and trait-level pathogen avoidance

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paola Perone ◽  
David Vaughn Becker ◽  
Joshua M. Tybur
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Visual Attention ◽  
Attentional Blink ◽  
Attentional Bias ◽  
Visual Stimuli ◽  
Attentional Biases ◽  
Attentional Processing ◽  
Trait Level ◽  
Task Irrelevant ◽  
Pathogen Avoidance

Multiple studies report that disgust-eliciting stimuli are perceived as salient and subsequently capture selective attention. In the current study, we aimed to better understand the nature of temporal attentional biases toward disgust-eliciting stimuli and to investigate the extent to which these biases are sensitive to contextual and trait-level pathogen avoidance motives. Participants (N=116) performed in an Emotional Attentional Blink (EAB) task in which task-irrelevant disgust-eliciting, fear-eliciting, or neutral images preceded a target by 200, 500, or 800 milliseconds (i.e., lag two, five and eight respectively). They did so twice - once while not exposed to an odor, and once while exposed to either an odor that elicited disgust or an odor that did not - and completed a measure of disgust sensitivity. Results indicate that disgust-eliciting visual stimuli produced a greater attentional blink than neutral visual stimuli at lag two and a greater attentional blink than fear-eliciting visual stimuli at both lag two and at lag five. Neither the odor manipulations nor individual differences measures moderated this effect. We propose that visual attention is engaged for a longer period of time following disgust-eliciting stimuli because covert processes automatically initiate the evaluation of pathogen threats. The fact that state and trait pathogen avoidance do not influence this temporal attentional bias suggests that early attentional processing of pathogen cues is initiated independent from the context in which such cues are perceived.

scholarly journals A bridge to progress further afield: The promise of a common framework on attentional capture

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Most ◽  
Kim Curby
Keyword(s):  
Attentional Capture ◽  
Attentional Biases ◽  
Perceptual Expertise ◽  
Physical Factors ◽  
Attentional Allocation ◽  
Clinical Disorders ◽  
Common Framework ◽  
Emotional Resonance ◽  
Advance Theory

Although physical salience looms large in the attentional capture literature, stimuli can also capture attention via salience deriving from non-physical factors. Such psychological salience can stem, for example, from the emotional resonance of stimuli or their relevance to a person’s expertise. We consider how insights from a recently proposed framework for attentional capture can be used to advance theory and drive research on the role of emotion-driven attentional biases in clinical disorders and on how attentional allocation changes with the development of perceptual expertise. In return, we wonder how their common framework can be enriched through considerations of psychological salience.

Attentional capture by completely task-irrelevant faces

2014 ◽  
Vol 79 (4) ◽  
pp. 523-533 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shiori Sato ◽  
Jun I. Kawahara
Keyword(s):  
Attentional Capture ◽  
Task Irrelevant

Does a Single Session of Training Modify Emotion-Induced Blindness?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandersan Onie ◽  
Chris Donkin ◽  
Steven Most
Keyword(s):  
Attentional Bias ◽  
Strong Evidence ◽  
Attentional Biases ◽  
Target Interval ◽  
Single Session ◽  
Attentional Bias Modification ◽  
Task Irrelevant ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Bias Modification ◽  
Negative Stimuli

Emotion-Induced Blindness (EIB) is a robust phenomenon in which people fail to see targets that appear in spatiotemporal proximity to task-irrelevant emotional distractors. Evidence suggests that it involves different mechanisms than tasks widely used to assess attentional biases and their modification. To assess the utility of EIB as an attentional bias modification task, we investigated its malleability in two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants trained to ignore negative distractors, ignore neutral distractors, or simply received equivalent exposure to negative distractors over 720 trials. Analyses revealed strong evidence against effects of training condition. Experiment 2 investigated whether training effects might emerge with EIB was tested at a longer distractor-target interval and added an additional, no-distractor comparison condition. Analyses of Experiment 2 provided some evidence that exposure to negative stimuli may reduce the impact of novel negative stimuli, which may hold implications for the wider attentional literature.

scholarly journals Miss it and miss out: Counterproductive nonspatial attentional capture by task-irrelevant, value-related stimuli

2017 ◽  
Vol 79 (6) ◽  
pp. 1628-1642 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike E. Le Pelley ◽  
Tina Seabrooke ◽  
Briana L. Kennedy ◽  
Daniel Pearson ◽  
Steven B. Most
Keyword(s):  
Attentional Capture ◽  
Task Irrelevant

scholarly journals Surprise-induced Deafness: Unexpected Auditory Stimuli Capture Attention to the Detriment of Subsequent Detection

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takashi Obana ◽  
Stephen Wee Hun Lim ◽  
Christopher L. Asplund
Keyword(s):  
Attentional Blink ◽  
Attentional Capture ◽  
Attentional Control ◽  
Auditory Stimuli ◽  
Auditory Presentation ◽  
Natural Sounds ◽  
Probe Detection ◽  
Perceptual Deficit ◽  
Task Irrelevant

Our attention is often captured by unexpected or unusual sounds. Such stimulus- driven control of attention can be adaptive, as potentially relevant events need to be quickly evaluated and acted upon. Attentional capture, however, comes with a cost: Ongoing tasks may be disrupted. In a series of seven experiments (n=773), we investigated the effects of task-irrelevant, rare, and relatively unexpected sounds (“surprise stimuli”) on probe detection in rapid auditory presentation (RAP) streams. Surprise stimuli caused “Surprise-induced Deafness” (SiD), a severe detection deficit that lasted for under one second within each trial and gradually habituated across several trials. SiD was sensitive to informational “surprise”, with larger deficits following stimuli that were infrequent or varied across trials. The effect also generalized: Natural sounds or constructed stimuli could disrupt detection of either spoken letters or simple tones. We also compared SiD to the auditory attentional blink (AAB), a similar paradigm in which goal-directed target processing disrupts probe detection. We found that the two deficits were weakly correlated. We conclude that SiD is a novel perceptual deficit that primarily reflects stimulus-driven attentional capture. It may involve other forms of attentional control as well, thereby reflecting multiple attentional influences on awareness.

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