Frequency of filler items does not modulate the emotional attentional blink

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the emotional attentional blink (EAB; emotion-induced blindness), emotional distractors impair report of subsequent targets in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) streams of fillers. Recent research demonstrated that the EAB is surprisingly weak. Because RSVP includes serial abrupt onset fillers which otherwise might capture attention, we hypothesized that participants might broadly suppress stimulus-driven attention and enhance goal-driven control to allow for target detection. Such suppression could in turn reduce emotional capture and the EAB. The present study thus compared the EAB in typical RSVP tasks to that in “skeletal” tasks with most fillers omitted, reasoning that reducing the number of fillers would reduce the likelihood of broad suppression of capture, thus enhancing the EAB in skeletal tasks. However, similar EABs were observed in both tasks within-participants, ruling out this hypothesis. This research is also, to the best of our knowledge, the first demonstration of an EAB using a skeletal paradigm.