Capture by fear revisited: An electrophysiological investigation

Abstract

The present study, using a cueing paradigm, reexamined the claim of an attentional bias towards fearful faces. In Experiment 1, participants searched a target display for a letter in a specific colour. This target display was preceded by a noninformative cue display, which contained coloured boxes (one in the target colour and one in the distractor colour) or emotional faces (one fearful face and one neutral face). Each cue could appear in the same location as the target (validly cued) or different (invalidly cued). To determine whether the cues captured attention, we used an electrophysiological measure of spatial attention known as the N2pc effect. The target colour cue produced a substantial N2pc effect and a robust cue validity effect on behavioural data, indicating capture by stimuli that match what participants are looking for. However, neither effect was present for the task-irrelevant fearful face cue. These findings suggest that negative stimuli (such as fearful facial expressions) do not generally have the inherent power to capture spatial attention against our will. Experiment 2 showed that these same fearful faces could capture attention when fearful expressions became task relevant. Thus, the critical determinant of capture appears to be task relevance, rather than perceived threat.