The modulation of task relevance on emotion-induced blindness depends on whether targets and distractors belong to the same category.

Previous research on emotion-induced blindness (EIB) argues emotional distractors capture attention in a bottom-up manner due to their physical and emotional salience. However, recent research has shown it is controversial whether EIB will be modulated by top-down factors. The present study further investigated whether the magnitude of EIB would be modulated by top-down factors, specifically the emotional relevance between tasks and distractors. Participants were divided into two groups having the same targets except for different task instructions. The orientation judgment group was asked to judge the orientation of the target (an emotionally irrelevant task), and the emotion judgment group was required to judge the emotional valence of the target (an emotionally relevant task). It was found the emotional relevance between tasks and distractors has no modulation on the magnitudes of EIB in two groups when targets and distractors are from different categories (Experiment 1), but a modulation when they are from the same category (Experiment 2). Consequently, we contend top-down task relevance modulates the EIB effect and distractors' priority is regulated by the emotional relevance between tasks and distractors. The current study holds attentional capture by stimulus-driven is unconditional in EIB, while attentional capture by goal-driven requires certain conditions.

Event-related potentials of food-induced blindness in the rapid serial visual presentation paradigm.

Emotion-induced blindness is known as the impairment in the identification of targets that follow shortly after emotional distractors in the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm. Besides negative or erotic stimuli, food distractors have also been found to elicit a similar effect. This indicates an attentional bias for food stimuli in the temporal dimension of visual attention, which is highly relevant in the context of eating behaviour. So far, the neural mechanisms of this food-induced blindness are widely unknown. In the present study (N = 53), we investigated event-related potentials (ERPs) in response to food distractors and non-food targets in a single-target RSVP task. Automatic capture of visual attention by task-irrelevant food distractors was evident in enhanced Distractor Negativity (N2) and Early Food Positivity (P1). However, food distractors did not elicit a P3b. Thus, apparently, not the encoding of food distractors in working memory but alternative attentional processes are responsible for the food-induced blindness. Reduced target P3b reflected errors in target identification but was unaffected by the preceding distractor. In contrast, target N2 was specifically reduced for unidentified targets preceded by food distractors. Presumably, the attentional capture of food distractors may have caused a reduction of target N2, thereby contributing to the impairment in target identification. However, future research is needed to confirm this assumption and bridge the gap between the food-induced blindness on the behavioural level and the attentional capture of food stimuli reflected in the distractor ERPs.

Emotional stimuli similarly disrupt attention in both visual fields.

People often need to filter relevant from irrelevant information. Irrelevant emotional distractors interrupt this process. But does the degree to which emotional distractors disrupt attention depend on which visual field they appear in? We thought it might for two reasons: (1) people pay slightly more attention to the left than the right visual field, and (2) some research suggests the right-hemisphere (which, in early visual processing, receives left visual field input) has areas specialised for processing emotion. Participants viewed a rapid image-stream in each visual field and reported the rotation of an embedded neutral target preceded by a negative or neutral distractor. We predicted that the degree to which negative (vs. neutral) distractors impaired target detection would be larger when targets appeared in the left than the right stream. This hypothesis was supported, but only when the distractor and target could appear in the same or opposite stream as each other (Experiments 2a-b), not when they always appeared in the same stream as each other (Experiments 1a-1b). However, this effect was driven by superior left-stream accuracy following neutral distractors, and similar left- and right-stream accuracy following negative distractors. Emotional distractors therefore override visuospatial asymmetries and disrupt attention, regardless of visual field.

Prior memory encoding of negative distractors biases emotion-induced blindness.

Previous research has shown that the proactive deprioritization of emotional distractors through the provision of information about the distractors or passive habituation of emotional distractors may attenuate emotion-induced blindness (EIB) in the rapid serial visual presentation stream. However, whether prior memory encoding of emotional distractors could bias the EIB effect remains unknown. To address this question, this study employed a three-phase paradigm integrating an item-method direct forgetting (DF) procedure with a classic EIB procedure. Participants completed a memory coding phase to either remember or forget negative pictures, then performed an intermediate phase of the EIB test, and finally finished a recognition test. Critically, the same to-be-forgotten (TBF) and to-be-remembered (TBR) negative pictures in the memory learning phase were used as emotional distractors in the intermediate EIB test. The results replicated the typical DF effect by showing higher recognition accuracies for TBR pictures compared to those for TBF pictures. More importantly, the TBF negative distractors attenuated the EIB effect compared to the TBR negative distractors, but showed a comparable EIB effect as the novel negative distractors. These findings indicate that prior memory encoding manipulations of negative distractors could bias subsequent EIB effects, providing an important approach to modulate the EIB effect.

Spatial distribution of emotional attentional blink under top-down attentional control.

Emotion-induced blindness (EIB) refers to the impaired perception of a neutral target that follows an emotional distractor within the time gap of 100-500 ms. Recent studies on EIB show that EIB is spatially localized. Blink occurs when both target and emotional distractor appear in the same stream but not the opposite. However, the influence of top-down attentional control over the dual-stream EIB remains poorly understood. Examining the role of top-down control in EIB will help understand the impact of attentional control over the spatial distribution of EIB and in understanding the Attentional Blink (AB) and EIB distinction. Hence, in the present study, we used dual-stream and manipulated the attentional control by changing the relevance of the emotional image and asking participants to report both emotional and neutral targets. Our results show a similar level of blink irrespective of the spatial location of the emotional T1, suggesting the role of attentional control on the spatial distribution of EIB and in the AB-EIB distinction. Results have implications for the theoretical understanding of EIB.

Real world familiarity does not reduce susceptibility to emotional disruption of perception: evidence from two temporal attention tasks.

The visual system has been found to prioritise emotional stimuli so robustly that their presence can temporarily "blind" people to non-emotional targets in their direct line of vision. This has ostensible implications for the real world: medics must not be blinded to important information despite the trauma they confront, and drivers must not be blinded when passing emotionally engaging billboards. One possibility is that the familiarity of goal-relevant information can protect people's perception of it despite emotional distraction (e.g. drivers' perception might be less impaired by graphic ads when on a familiar road). In two experiments, we tested whether familiarity renders targets more perceptible following the presentation of an emotional distractor in two temporal attention tasks, emotion-induced blindness (Experiment 1) and the attentional blink (Experiment 2). Targets were pictures of familiar or unfamiliar locations. Although, overall, familiar targets were seen better than unfamiliar targets in both studies, stimulus familiarity did not reduce the relative perceptual impairments caused by emotional distractors.

Manipulations of distractor frequency do not mitigate emotion-induced blindness.

Emotional distractors can impair perception of subsequently presented targets, a phenomenon called emotion-induced blindness. Do emotional distractors lose their power to disrupt perception when appearing with increased frequency, perhaps due to desensitisation or enhanced recruitment of proactive control? Non-emotional tasks, such as the Stroop, have revealed that high frequency distractors or conflict lead to reduced interference, and distractor frequency appears to modulate attentional capture by emotional distractors in spatial attention tasks. But emotion-induced blindness is thought to reflect perceptual competition between targets and emotional distractors, and it is unclear whether high frequency emotional stimuli cause less disruption at this relatively early stage of processing. In four experiments, participants searched streams of images for a rotated target image. A negative or neutral distractor appeared before the target, and their relative frequency was manipulated. Across all experiments, the frequency of emotional distractors did not modulate emotion-induced blindness even when participants were explicitly informed that they would appear often or seldom. Thus, increased distractor frequency does not appear to mitigate the priority allotted to emotional distractors during perceptual competition.

Do emotion-induced blindness and the attentional blink share underlying mechanisms? An event-related potential study of emotionally-arousing words.

When two targets are presented within approximately 500 ms of each other in the context of rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), participants' ability to report the second target is reduced compared to when the targets are presented further apart in time. This phenomenon is known as the attentional blink (AB). The AB is increased in magnitude when the first target is emotionally arousing. Emotionally arousing stimuli can also capture attention and create an AB-like effect even when these stimuli are presented as to-be-ignored distractor items in a single-target RSVP task. This phenomenon is known as emotion-induced blindness (EIB). The phenomenological similarity in the behavioral results associated with the AB with an emotional T1 and EIB suggest that these effects may result from similar underlying mechanisms - a hypothesis that we tested using event-related electrical brain potentials (ERPs). Behavioral results replicated those reported previously, demonstrating an enhanced AB following an emotionally arousing target and a clear EIB effect. In both paradigms highly arousing taboo/sexual words resulted in an increased early posterior negativity (EPN) component that has been suggested to represent early semantic activation and selection for further processing in working memory. In both paradigms taboo/sexual words also produced an increased late positive potential (LPP) component that has been suggested to represent consolidation of a stimulus in working memory. Therefore, ERP results provide evidence that the EIB and emotion-enhanced AB effects share a common underlying mechanism.

Individual differences in emotion-induced blindness: Are they reliable and what do they measure?

The emotion-induced-blindness (EIB) paradigm has been extensively used to investigate attentional biases to emotionally salient stimuli. However, the low reliability of EIB scores (the difference in performance between the neutral and emotionally salient condition) limits the effectiveness of the paradigm for investigating individual differences. Here, across two studies, we investigated whether we could improve the reliability of EIB scores. In Experiment 1, we introduced a mid-intensity emotionally salient stimuli condition, with the goal of obtaining a wider range of EIB magnitudes to promote reliability. In Experiment 2, we sought to reduce the attentional oddball effect, so we created a modified EIB paradigm by removing the filler images. Neither of these approaches improved the reliability of the EIB scores. Reliability for the high- and mid-intensity EIB difference scores were low, while reliability of the scores for absolute performance (neutral, high-, and mid-intensity) were high and the scores were also highly correlated, even though overall performance in the emotionally salient conditions were significantly worse than in the neutral conditions. Given these results, we can conclude that while emotionally salient stimuli impair performance in the EIB task compared with the neutral condition, the strong correlation between the emotionally salient and neutral conditions means that while EIB can be used to investigate individual differences in attentional control, it is not selective to individual differences in attentional biases to emotionally salient stimuli.

Acute stress reduces attentional blindness: Relations with resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia and cortisol.

This study made the first attempt to combine resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) and cortisol to provide an explanatory mechanism for the effect of acute stress on emotion-induced blindness (EIB) from the perspective of vagus nerve activity and stress hormone responses. For this purpose, resting electrocardiogram (ECG) signals were recorded first. Participants underwent both the socially evaluated cold-pressor test and control treatments 7 days apart and then completed the EIB task. Heart rate and saliva samples were collected over time. The results demonstrated that acute stress promoted the overall detection of targets. Resting RSA and cortisol levels predicted the stress-induced changes in EIB performance under the negative distractor condition at lag2 negatively and positively, respectively. These findings indicate that the effect of stress on EIB was partially contributed by cortisol, which is more relevant to negative distractor conditions. Resting RSA, as an indicator of inter-individual differences, further provided evidence from the perspective of the trait emotional regulation ability based on the vagus nerve control. In general, resting RSA and cortisol changes over time exhibit different patterns of influence on stress-induced changes in EIB performance. Thus, this study provides a more comprehensive understanding of the effect of acute stress on attentional blindness.

Crisis-related stimuli do not increase the emotional attentional blink in a general university student population.

Crises such as natural disasters or pandemics negatively impact the mental health of the affected community, increasing rates of depression, anxiety, or stress. It has been proposed that this stems in part from crisis-related stimuli triggering negative reactions that interrupt daily life. Given the frequency and prominence of crisis events, it is crucial to understand when crisis-related stimuli involuntarily capture attention and trigger increased stress and distraction from obligations. The emotional attentional blink (EAB) paradigm-in which emotional distractors hinder report of subsequent targets in streams of rapidly displayed stimuli-allows examination of such attentional capture in a rapidly changing dynamic environment. EABs are typically observed with generally disturbing stimuli, but stimuli related to personal traumas yield similar or greater effects, indicating strong attentional capture by stimuli related to individual trauma history. The current study investigated whether a similar comparable or increased crisis-related EAB exists within a community affected by large-scale crisis. Specifically, effects of conventional emotional distractors and distractors related to recent crises were compared using EABs in university students without a mental health diagnosis. Experiment 1 used images related to Hurricane Harvey, evaluating a crisis 4 years prior to data collection. Experiment 2 used words related to the COVID pandemic, evaluating an ongoing crisis at the time of data collection. In both experiments, the conventional EAB distractors yielded strong EABs, while the crisis-related distractors yielded absent or weak EABs in the same participants. This suggests that crisis-related stimuli do not have special potency for capturing attention in the general university student population. More generally, crises affecting communities do not necessarily yield widespread, strong reactivity to crisis-related stimuli.

Emotion-Induced Blindness Is Impervious to Working Memory Load.

Emotionally-salient stimuli receive attentional priority. Here, we tested the extent to which top-down control can modulate this prioritization within the domain of temporal attention. To test this prioritization, we measured emotion-induced blindness, which is the effect whereby the perception of a target is impaired by the presentation of a negative distractor that precedes the target in a rapid serial visual presentation stream, relative to target perception following a neutral distractor. The degree of top-down control was investigated by manipulating participants' concurrent working memory load while performing the task. The working-memory load consisted of participants performing mathematical calculations (no load = no calculation; low load = adding two numbers; and high load = adding and subtracting four numbers). Results indicated that the magnitude of emotion-induced blindness was not affected by the working-memory load. This finding, when combined with those of previous studies, supports the notion that the prioritization of emotionally-salient stimuli in the temporal allocation of attention does not require top-down processing, while it does in the spatial allocation of attention. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-022-00176-9.

The effect of acute stress on spatial selectivity in dual-stream emotion induced blindness: The role of cortisol and spontaneous frontal EEG theta/beta ratio.

The current study explored the effect of acute stress on dual-stream emotion induced blindness (EIB). We focused on spatially localised target processing induced by stress, as well as the role of cortisol and the frontal EEG theta/beta ratio (TBR). Eight-minutes spontaneous EEG data were recorded first. After performing a Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) or a corresponding control task a week apart, the participants completed a dual-stream EIB task. Changes in cortisol levels over time were likewise recorded. We found that stress promoted the target processing in the same stream location as the distractor, eliminating the spatial-localisation effect. Cortisol and frontal TBR positively and negatively, respectively, predicted a reduced spatially localised target detection induced by stress following negative distractors. Overall, acute stress apparently reduced the dual-stream EIB due to the effective allocation of limited resources. Further, the role of cortisol associated with better target detection was more specific to the negative distractor condition and partially disassociated from the general stress response. Cortisol levels and frontal TBR independently predicted the spatially localised processing, suggesting differentiated influence paths of trait and state factors on target detection following emotional distractors.

More than a feeling: The emotional attentional blink relies on non-emotional "pop out," but is weak compared to the attentional blink.

The attentional blink (AB) reveals temporal limits of goal-driven attention: the second of two proximate targets presented in a rapid stream of non-targets is often missed. In the emotional AB (EAB, also termed emotion-induced blindness), an emotionally valenced distractor replacing the first target yields a similar blink. However, the AB and EAB have not been adequately compared, and thus the extent of their mechanistic similarity remains unclear. The current study interleaved AB and EAB trials using identical stimuli in the same participants and observed that the AB is consistently larger than the EAB. Moreover, the four main experiments varied in both target-defining features (semantic vs. perceptual) and EAB distractor salience (emotion alone vs. emotion plus physical distinctiveness); an EAB was observed only when distractors were physically distinct. Even when a large EAB was observed, the AB was still larger using a task with identical targets and fillers in the same individuals. These results suggest that: (1) goal-driven attentional control (measured by the AB) has a greater influence than stimulus-driven attentional control (measured by the EAB: emotion valence and physical distinctiveness) on selection from a dynamic series of stimuli, and (2) emotional valence is insufficient on its own to trigger an EAB. However, these results are consistent with the account that when attention has already been captured by a physically salient distractor, emotional content can interfere with disengagement from the already-attended stimulus.

Blinded by and Stuck in Negative Emotions: Is Psychological Inflexibility Across Different Domains Related?

Psychological inflexibility is theorized to underlie difficulties adjusting mental processes in response to changing circumstances. People show inflexibility across a range of domains, including attention, cognition, and affect. But it remains unclear whether common mechanisms underlie inflexibility in different domains. We investigated this possibility in a pre-registered replication and extension examining associations among attentional, cognitive, and affective inflexibility measures. Participants (N = 196) completed lab tasks assessing (a) emotion-induced blindness, the tendency for task-irrelevant emotional stimuli to impair attention allocation to non-emotional stimuli; (b) emotional inertia, the tendency for feelings to persist across time and contexts; and global self-report measures of (c) repetitive negative thinking, the tendency to repeatedly engage in negative self-focused thoughts (i.e., rumination, worry). Based on prior research linking repetitive negative thinking with negative affect inertia, on one hand, and emotion-induced blindness, on the other, we predicted positive correlations among all three measures of inflexibility. However, none of the three measures were related and Bayes factors indicated strong evidence for independence. Supplementary analyses ruled out alternative explanations for our findings, e.g., analytic decisions. Although our findings question the overlap between attentional, cognitive, and affective inflexibility measures, this study has methodological limitations. For instance, our measures varied across more than their inflexibility domain and our sample, relative to previous studies, included a high proportion of Asian participants who may show different patterns of ruminative thinking to non-Asian participants. Future research should address these limitations to confirm that common mechanisms do not underlie attentional, cognitive, and affective inflexibility. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-022-00145-2.

Don't look now! Emotion-induced blindness: The interplay between emotion and attention.

Scientists have long been interested in understanding the influence of emotionally salient stimuli on attention and perception. One experimental paradigm that has shown great promise in demonstrating the effect of such stimuli is emotion-induced blindness. That is, when emotionally salient stimuli are presented in a rapid stream of stimuli, they produce impairments in the perception of task-relevant stimuli, even though they themselves are task irrelevant. This is known as emotion-induced blindness, and it is a profound and robust form of attentional bias. Here, we review the literature on emotion-induced blindness, such as identifying the types of stimuli that elicit it, and its temporal dynamics. We discuss the role of dimensional versus categorical approaches to emotion in relation to emotion-induced blindness. We also synthesize the work examining whether certain individuals, such as those high in anxiety versus psychopathy, succumb to emotion-induced blindness to different extents, and we discuss whether the deficit can be reduced or even abolished. We review the theoretical models that have been proposed to explain the phenomenon. Finally, we identify exciting questions for future research, and elucidate useful frameworks to guide future investigations.

Searching for emotional salience.

In the emotion induced blindness (EIB) paradigm, participants search for a single target picture embedded in a rapidly presented sequence of "background" pictures. When the sequence also contains a task-irrelevant, emotional distractor appearing shortly before the target, awareness for the target is severely impaired (Most, Chun, Widders, & Zald, 2005). This temporary "blindness" for the target is thought to reflect attention capture by the emotionally salient distractor which blocks the target's access to the attention system. However, there are also reasons to suspect that physical salience may play an important role in the initial attention capture process. The emotional pictures consist of close-ups of people and animals while the background pictures are wide-angle views of landscapes and cityscapes. These physical differences might result in pop-out of the distractor picture that is at least partially based on physical and not emotional salience. We investigated the role of physical salience in emotional capture by comparing the typical EIB paradigm, which uses dissimilar distractors, with one in which the background pictures consist of people and animals in non-emotional settings (similar distractors). If emotional salience is the basis of attention capture in EIB, we should see similar amounts of target suppression in both conditions. Instead, we found that the EIB effect was reduced and possibly eliminated in the similar background condition. A control experiment revealed that emotional information was still available in the similar background condition because the blink was restored when the emotional picture was designated for report by a salient cue. These findings are clearly inconsistent with current theories of EIB (e.g., McHugo, Olatunji, & Zald, 2013) which assume that initial attention capture is driven by emotional not physical salience.

A vigilance avoidance account of spatial selectivity in dual-stream emotion induced blindness.

Emotion-induced blindness (EIB) is the impaired processing of neutral images when they are preceded in close temporal proximity by an emotive distractor. Dual-stream EIB contains two visual streams so the distractor and target can appear in either the same or opposite streams. Results from these studies suggest that the EIB effect is spatially localised. That is, for EIB to occur, the target must appear in the same stream as the distractor. An early spatially localised attention model has been proposed to account for these results. However, such an explanation is incompatible with the involvement of a high-level attentional-bottleneck in the processing of emotive stimuli. Here we propose and test an alternative account of the dual-stream EIB findings - specifically, a vigilance-avoidance (VA) account that is compatible with the high-level attentional bottleneck. We tested this model by using both negative and positive distractors and by measuring the trait anxiety of the participants. VA predicts that spatial localisation of the EIB effect would only occur with negative (threat-based) distractors with participants who have high levels of trait anxiety and that for all other conditions EIB would be obtained in both streams, while the early-localised-attention account predicts spatial localisation for both types of distractors, regardless of trait-anxiety levels. Results supported the VA model. This means that the results of EIB studies as a whole are consistent with conventional-attentional-bottleneck theories and therefore support the use of the EIB paradigm to investigate the impact of emotive stimuli on attentional processing.

Emotional capture during emotion-induced blindness is not automatic.

The present research used behavioral and event-related brain potentials (ERP) measures to determine whether emotional capture is automatic in the emotion-induced blindness (EIB) paradigm. The first experiment varied the priority of performing two concurrent tasks: identifying a negative or neutral picture appearing in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream of pictures and multiple object tracking (MOT). Results showed that increased attention to the MOT task resulted in decreased accuracy for identifying both negative and neutral target pictures accompanied by decreases in the amplitude of the P3b component. In contrast, the early posterior negativity (EPN) component elicited by negative pictures was unaffected by variations in attention. Similarly, there was a decrement in MOT performance for dual-task versus single task conditions but no effect of picture type (negative vs neutral) on MOT accuracy which isn't consistent with automatic emotional capture of attention. However, the MOT task might simply be insensitive to brief interruptions of attention. The second experiment used a more sensitive reaction time (RT) measure to examine this possibility. Results showed that RT to discriminate a gap appearing in a tracked object was delayed by the simultaneous appearance of to-be-ignored distractor pictures even though MOT performance was once again unaffected by the distractor. Importantly, the RT delay was the same for both negative and neutral distractors suggesting that capture was driven by physical salience rather than emotional salience of the distractors. Despite this lack of emotional capture, the EPN component, which is thought to reflect emotional capture, was still present. We suggest that the EPN doesn't reflect capture but rather downstream effects of attention, including object recognition. These results show that capture by emotional pictures in EIB can be suppressed when attention is engaged in another difficult task. The results have important implications for understanding capture effects in EIB.

Reward and emotion influence attentional bias in rapid serial visual presentation.

Facial emotion constitutes an important source of information, and rapid processing of this information may bring adaptive advantages. Previous evidence suggests that emotional faces are sometimes prioritised for cognitive processing. Three experiments used an emotion-induced blindness task to examine whether this prioritisation occurs in a purely stimulus-driven fashion or whether it emerges only when the faces are task-relevant. Angry or neutral faces appeared as distractors in a rapid serial visual presentation sequence, shortly before a target that participants were required to identify. Either the emotion (Experiment 1) or gender (Experiments 2 and 3) of the distractor face indicated whether a correct/incorrect response to the target would produce reward/punishment, or not. The three experiments found that reward-related faces impaired subsequent target identification, replicating previous results. Target identification accuracy was also impaired following angry faces, compared with neutral faces, demonstrating an emotion-induced attentional bias. Importantly, this impairment was observed even when face emotion was entirely irrelevant to the participants' ongoing task (in Experiments 2 and 3), suggesting that rapid processing of the facial emotion might arise (at least in part) from the operation of relatively automatic cognitive-perceptual processes.