Abstract
Previous research showed that threat-related faces, due to their intrinsic motivational relevance, capture attention more readily than neutral faces. Here we used a standard temporal order judgment (TOJ) task to assess whether negative (either angry or fearful) emotional faces, when competing with neutral faces for attention selection, may lead to a prior entry effect and hence be perceived as appearing first, especially when uncertainty is high regarding the order of the two onsets. We did not find evidence for this conjecture across five different experiments, despite the fact that participants were invariably influenced by asynchronies in the respective onsets of the two competing faces in the pair, and could reliably identify the emotion in the faces. Importantly, by systematically varying task demands across experiments, we could rule out confounds related to suboptimal stimulus presentation or inappropriate task demands. These findings challenge the notion of an early automatic capture of attention by (negative) emotion. Future studies are needed to investigate whether the lack of systematic bias of attention by emotion is imputed to the primacy of a non-emotional cue to resolve the TOJ task, which in turn prevents negative emotion to exert an early bottom-up influence on the guidance of spatial and temporal attention.
Highlights
Results obtained from a variety of experimental paradigms suggest that, under specific circumstances, negative emotional stimuli may receive prioritized access to awareness by biasing perceptual and attentional processes [1,2,3,4,5]
For none of the three conditions did the one-sample t-test reach significance [FearNeut: t(31) = 1.15, p = .260; FearFear: t(31) = 1.37, p = .180; NeutNeut: t(31) = 1.82, p = .079], indicating no reliable prior entry effect for fearful compared to neutral faces (Figure 2B)
Behavioral results showed that the distribution of the proportion of ‘‘right first’’ responses was consistent with the results obtained in Experiment 1: responses were close to chance level at short compared to long stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs)
Summary
Results obtained from a variety of experimental paradigms suggest that, under specific circumstances, negative emotional stimuli may receive prioritized access to awareness by biasing perceptual and attentional processes [1,2,3,4,5]. Studies using spatial cueing tasks have shown that emotion-laden stimuli facilitate the processing of (non-emotional) targets subsequently presented at the same location, consistent with the assumption of a rapid orienting of attention towards these (task-irrelevant) stimuli, as opposed to neutral ones [20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27]. Taken together, these findings suggest that motivationally relevant stimuli (including negative facial expressions) can exert a strong modulatory influence on attentional control processes. Because attention accelerates sensory processing [33,34], the stimulus appearing on the attended location is processed faster and, as a consequence, its onset is perceived as occurring first (visual prior entry; see [35,36,37])
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