Makovski Tal, Chajut Eran
Department of Education and Psychology, The Open University of Israel.
Psychol Sci. 2021 Feb;32(2):256-266. doi: 10.1177/0956797620963612. Epub 2021 Jan 5.
Do people allocate more or fewer attentional resources when preparing for negative emotional visual stimuli to appear? In three experiments (total = 150), participants performed a change-detection task while expecting a neutral, threatening, disgusting, or joyful stimulus or no stimulus to appear at a fixed moment. Responses to an infrequent dot probe were faster when participants were expecting a distracting stimulus. Importantly, although only negative stimuli impaired change-detection performance, there was no difference between the preparation effect for threatening and neutral stimuli (Experiment 1) or disgusting and joyful stimuli (Experiment 3). The preparation effects were also unaffected by the participant's anxiety level. Experiment 2 confirmed that the threatening images affected performance when the dot probe appeared after the image. These results suggest that the visual system increases alertness in response to any upcoming stimulus and further imply that the effects of emotional stimuli largely occur after, but not before, the stimuli appear.
当准备负面情绪视觉刺激出现时，人们分配的注意力资源会更多还是更少？在三项实验（共150名参与者）中，参与者在期待中性、威胁性、恶心或愉悦刺激或无刺激在固定时刻出现的同时执行变化检测任务。当参与者期待一个分散注意力的刺激时，对偶尔出现的点探测的反应会更快。重要的是，虽然只有负面刺激会损害变化检测性能，但对威胁性和中性刺激的准备效果（实验1）或恶心和愉悦刺激的准备效果（实验3）之间没有差异。准备效果也不受参与者焦虑水平的影响。实验2证实，当点探测在图像之后出现时，威胁性图像会影响性能。这些结果表明，视觉系统会对任何即将出现的刺激提高警觉性，并且进一步暗示情绪刺激的影响主要发生在刺激出现之后，而不是之前。
