Reduction of emotional distraction during target processing by attentional manipulations

Abstract

Previous research has demonstrated that fully irrelevant distractors – i.e., not sharing any feature with the target – capture our attention and modulate our responses. In the present study, we explored this interference by irrelevant distractors in a series of three experiments wherein the emotional valence of distractors (negative vs. neutral valence) was manipulated along with endogenous and exogenous attention. We aimed at jointly investigating – within the same paradigm – the possible modulations over the interference effect by these three critical variables in a systematic way. Although we replicated the interference effect by distractors previously reported in Martín-Arévalo et al. (2015), results showed no attentional and only weak emotional valence modulations over the interference effect. We discuss the possible boundary conditions underlying the absence (or weakness) of modulations over the interference effect by distractors observed in our experiments.