Emotional Salience and Inattentional Blindness: Comparing Fearful, Happy and Disgusting visual stimuli and their inattentional blindness breakthrough

Abstract

Inattentional blindness (IB) refers to the failure to consciously detect visible but unexpected stimuli when attention is engaged in a demanding task. While emotional stimuli, particularly threat-related ones, are often thought to break through IB, the role of disgust remains unclear. The present study examined whether disgust, fear, and happy stimuli differ in their ability to reach awareness under high perceptual load. Participants (N = 108) completed a modified cross-judgment task in which emotionally salient images were presented on critical trials. Awareness was assessed using a post-task probe, followed by a recognition task, alongside measures of task performance, signal detection, and eye-tracking. Results showed an IB rate of 23.1%. Emotional stimuli affected task performance, with lower accuracy for fear and disgust compared to happy trials. However, sensitivity to disgust was low, recognition did not differ across emotions, and gaze measures showed no significant effects. These findings suggest that emotional stimuli can influence processing without reliably reaching awareness, highlighting a dissociation between attention and conscious perception.