Conditioned emotional cueing of spatial attentional shifts in a go/no-go RT task

Abstract

The influence of conditioned emotional arousal on selective attention was evaluated in a go/no-go version of Posner's covert attention spatial orienting task (Posner et al., 1982). Ten males and 10 females participated in the study, which consisted of two phases; an initial conditioning phase and a subsequent attention phase. In the conditioning phase, the Conditioning group received a 90-dB white noise unconditioned stimulus (UCS) contingent with presentations of a frame-lit rectangle, which thus became a conditioned stimulus (CS +), while a completely-lit rectangle was never paired with the noise and became a CS −. The Control group received non-contingent presentations of the noise and the two rectangles. In the attention phase, both groups participated in a go/no-go version of the attention orienting task, where targets were cued by both the CS + and the CS −. Half of the subjects in both the Conditioning and the Control group were instructed to respond only to targets cued by the CS + (go cue) and ignore targets cued by the CS − (no-go cue). The other half of the subjects responded to targets cued by the CS − and ignored targets cued by CS +. The Conditioning group identified targets at the opposite location of the CS + significantly faster than targets at the same location. The emotional salience of the cue thus reversed the typical cost of shifting attention to targets outside the cued location.