Cognitive Psychology Department, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Emotion. 2011 Aug;11(4):768-75. doi: 10.1037/a0023418.
Fear-related stimuli are often prioritized during visual selection but it remains unclear whether capture by salient objects is more likely to occur when individuals fear those objects. In this study, participants with high and low fear of spiders searched for a circle while on some trials a completely irrelevant fear-related (spider) or neutral distractor (butterfly/leaf) was presented simultaneously in the display. Our results show that when you fear spiders and you are not sure whether a spider is going to be present, then any salient distractor (i.e., a butterfly) grabs your attention, suggesting that mere expectation of a spider triggered compulsory monitoring of all irrelevant stimuli. However, neutral stimuli did not grab attention when high spider fearful people knew that a spider could not be present during a block of trials, treating the neutral stimuli just as the low spider fearful people do. Our results show that people that fear spiders inspect potential spider-containing locations in a compulsory fashion even though directing attention to this location is completely irrelevant for the task. Reduction of capture can only be accomplished when people that fear spiders do not expect a spider to be present.
与恐惧相关的刺激通常在视觉选择中优先处理，但目前尚不清楚当个体对这些物体感到恐惧时，是否更容易被显著物体捕获。在这项研究中，高恐惧和低恐惧蜘蛛的参与者在搜索圆形物体时，在某些试验中，一个完全不相关的与恐惧相关的（蜘蛛）或中性干扰物（蝴蝶/叶子）同时显示在屏幕上。我们的结果表明，当你害怕蜘蛛并且不确定是否会出现蜘蛛时，任何显著的干扰物（即蝴蝶）都会吸引你的注意力，这表明仅仅预期有蜘蛛就会触发对所有不相关刺激的强制性监控。然而，当高蜘蛛恐惧的人知道在一组试验中不会出现蜘蛛时，中性刺激并不会引起注意，他们对待中性刺激的方式与低蜘蛛恐惧的人一样。我们的结果表明，即使将注意力集中在这个位置与任务完全无关，害怕蜘蛛的人也会以强制性的方式检查可能包含蜘蛛的位置。只有当害怕蜘蛛的人不期望有蜘蛛出现时，才能减少捕获。
