University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USA.
University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USA.
Cognition. 2021 Sep;214:104730. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104730. Epub 2021 May 8.
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.
在情绪诱导的盲视（EIB）范式中，参与者在快速呈现的“背景”图片序列中搜索单个目标图片。当序列中还包含一个任务不相关、情绪干扰物，且该干扰物在目标出现前不久出现时，对目标的意识会严重受损（Most、Chun、Widders 和 Zald，2005）。这种对目标的暂时“盲视”被认为反映了情绪上显著的干扰物对注意力的捕获，从而阻止了目标进入注意力系统。然而，也有理由怀疑物理显著性在初始注意力捕获过程中可能发挥重要作用。情绪图片由人和动物的特写镜头组成，而背景图片则是风景和城市景观的广角视图。这些物理差异可能导致干扰物图片的突出显示，这至少部分基于物理而不是情绪显著性。我们通过比较典型的 EIB 范式（使用不相似的干扰物）和一种背景图片由非情绪环境中的人和动物组成的范式（相似的干扰物），研究了物理显著性在情绪捕获中的作用。如果情绪显著性是 EIB 中注意力捕获的基础，我们应该在两种情况下看到相似程度的目标抑制。然而，我们发现 EIB 效应在相似背景条件下减少甚至可能消除。一项控制实验表明，相似背景条件下仍然存在情绪信息，因为当情绪图片被突出提示指定为报告时，眨眼被恢复。这些发现与当前 EIB 理论（例如，McHugo、Olatunji 和 Zald，2013）明显不一致，这些理论假设初始注意力捕获是由情绪而不是物理显著性驱动的。
