Abstract
The emotional attentional blink (EAB), also known as emotion-induced blindness, refers to a phenomenon in which the brief appearance of a task-irrelevant, emotionally arousing image captures attention to such an extent that individuals cannot detect target stimuli for several hundred ms after the emotional stimulus. The EAB allows for mental chronometry of stimulus-driven attention and the time needed to disengage and refocus goal-directed attention. In this review, we discuss current evidence for the mechanisms through which the EAB occurs. Although the EAB shares some similarities to both surprise-induced blindness (SiB) and other paradigms for assessing emotion-attention interactions, it possesses features that are distinct from these paradigms, and thus appears to provide a unique measure of the influence of emotion on stimulus-driven attention. The neural substrates of the EAB are not completely understood, but neuroimaging and neuropsychological data suggest some possible neural mechanisms underlying the phenomenon. The importance of understanding the EAB is highlighted by recent evidence indicating that EAB tasks can detect altered sensitivity to disorder relevant stimuli in psychiatric conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Highlights
Rapid detection of emotionally salient events is critical for survival
While the dot probe task may capture an emotional impact on attention, it appears too brief and weak to represent the same phenomenon captured by the emotional attentional blink (EAB), which can last for 100 s of ms, and is seen consistently in the healthy young adult samples that we have studied far
We found that amygdala lesion patients, regardless of the side of the lesion, displayed comparable EABs to healthy controls for both negative and positive arousing distractors
Summary
The emotional attentional blink: what we know so far Maureen McHugo 1,2*, Bunmi O. The emotional attentional blink (EAB), known as emotion-induced blindness, refers to a phenomenon in which the brief appearance of a task-irrelevant, emotionally arousing image captures attention to such an extent that individuals cannot detect target stimuli for several hundred ms after the emotional stimulus. We contrast the EAB to other paradigms for studying emotion-attention interactions and review current neuroimaging and neuropsychological data for the mechanisms underlying the EAB. The EAB involves the presentation of task-irrelevant emotional distractors during an RSVP target detection task (see Figure 1B) In this paradigm, emotional distractors elicit an AB, even though the distractor stimuli are not targets (Arnell et al, 2004; Most et al, 2005). In a number of studies, we have observed that erotica induce an EAB that is often larger than that produced by aversive images
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