Attention interacts with emotion to drive perceptual impairment of images in an RSVP task

Abstract

Emotion Induced Blindness (EIB) is characterized by an impairment in the detection of a neutral target image when it appears between 100-500ms after the presentation of an emotional image. EIB has been argued to be an early level perceptual impairment resulting from spatio-temporal competition between the neutral target and the emotional distractor. While the role of attentional processes is implied in EIB, there hasn’t been a systematic comparison between EIB and Attentional Blink (AB) concerning the locus of attentional control. That is, in most of the AB studies, participants are required to identify and report T1 while in EIB studies they are asked to ignore the emotional distractor. Hence, the differences between AB and EIB may stem from this difference in attentional control. In Expt. 1 and Expt. 2 participants were asked to report two targets in an RSVP stream and we found similar impairment in both the experiments, irrespective of the emotional nature of the target. However, in Expt. 3 and 4 where participants were required to report only one target, only the emotional distractor captured attention, leading to an impairment in target detection. Our result shows that target impairment in EIB is due to the exogenous attentional allocation to the emotional image. i.e., distractor image being emotionally salient captures attention in a bottom-up manner leading to the impairment in the less salient target.