Abstract
Emotional stimuli (e.g., negative facial expressions) enjoy prioritized memory access when task relevant, consistent with their ability to capture attention. Whether emotional expression also impacts on memory access when task-irrelevant is important for arbitrating between feature-based and object-based attentional capture. Here, the authors address this question in 3 experiments using an attentional blink task with face photographs as first and second target (T1, T2). They demonstrate reduced neutral T2 identity recognition after angry or happy T1 expression, compared to neutral T1, and this supports attentional capture by a task-irrelevant feature. Crucially, after neutral T1, T2 identity recognition was enhanced and not suppressed when T2 was angry—suggesting that attentional capture by this task-irrelevant feature may be object-based and not feature-based. As an unexpected finding, both angry and happy facial expressions suppress memory access for competing objects, but only angry facial expression enjoyed privileged memory access. This could imply that these 2 processes are relatively independent from one another.
Highlights
Emotional stimuli enjoy prioritized memory access when task relevant, consistent with their ability to capture attention
Emotional facial expression is an important social signal, and there is considerable evidence for prioritized processing, when it is negatively valenced (Bar-Haim, Lamy, Pergamin, Bakermans-Kranenburg, & van IJzendoorn, 2007). This has been shown as increased detection speed for angry faces in a face-in-the-crowd task (Horstmann & Bauland, 2006; Schmidt-Daffy, 2011), preferential spatial attention for arousing facial expression in a dot probe task (Macleod & Mathews, 1988; MacLeod, Mathews, & Tata, 1986), and privileged memory access for angry and fearful expression when capacity is limited in the attentional blink task
If T1 and T2 are separated by a few distractor items, presence or identity of the T2 is less well reported than if it follows the T1 either immediately, or after an interval longer than 500 – 800 ms, a phenomenon termed attentional blink (AB) (Chun & Potter, 1995; Isaak, Shapiro, & Martin, 1999; Raymond, Shapiro, & Arnell, 1992)
Summary
Forty female university students (M age Ϯ SD ϭ 26.9 Ϯ 3.5 years) volunteered for Experiment 1, 20 students (eight male, 12 female, 24.6 Ϯ 5.0 years) for Experiment 2, and 24 students (seven male, 17 female, 23.2 Ϯ 3.8 years) for Experiment 3; all samples were independent from one another. The study was approved by the local research ethics committee
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