Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.
College of Education, Psychology and Social Work, Flinders University, Bedford Park, Australia.
Cogn Emot. 2023 May-Jun;37(4):633-649. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2023.2187353. Epub 2023 Mar 13.
People often need to filter relevant from irrelevant information. Irrelevant distractors interrupt this process. But does the degree to which emotional distractors disrupt attention depend on which visual field they appear in? We thought it might for two reasons: (1) people pay slightly more attention to the left than the right visual field, and (2) some research suggests the right-hemisphere (which, in early visual processing, receives left visual field input) has areas specialised for processing emotion. Participants viewed a rapid image-stream in each visual field and reported the rotation of an embedded neutral target preceded by a negative or neutral distractor. We predicted that the degree to which negative (vs. neutral) distractors impaired target detection would be larger when targets appeared in the left than the right stream. This hypothesis was supported, but only when the distractor and target could appear in the same or opposite stream as each other (Experiments 2a-b), not when they always appeared in the same stream as each other (Experiments 1a-1b). However, this effect was driven by superior left-stream accuracy following neutral distractors, and left- and right-stream accuracy following negative distractors. Emotional distractors therefore override visuospatial asymmetries and disrupt attention, regardless of visual field.
人们经常需要从无关信息中筛选相关信息。无关的干扰项会打断这个过程。但是，情绪干扰项对注意力的干扰程度是否取决于它们出现在哪个视野中呢？我们认为可能有两个原因：（1）人们对左视野的关注度略高于右视野，（2）一些研究表明，右半球（在早期视觉处理中接收左视野的输入）有专门处理情绪的区域。参与者在每个视野中观看快速的图像流，并报告嵌入的中性目标的旋转，该目标之前有负性或中性干扰项。我们预测，当目标出现在左视野而不是右视野时，负性（与中性相比）干扰项对目标检测的损害程度会更大。这一假设得到了支持，但只有当干扰项和目标可以出现在彼此相同或相反的流中时（实验 2a-b），而不是当它们总是出现在彼此相同的流中时（实验 1a-1b）。然而，这种效应是由中性干扰项后左视野的准确性提高驱动的，以及负性干扰项后左视野和右视野的准确性提高驱动的。因此，情绪干扰项会忽略视空间不对称性并扰乱注意力，而不管视野如何。
