Tagu Jérôme, Robert Christelle, Mathey Stéphanie
Univ. Bordeaux, LabPsy, UR 4139, F-33000 Bordeaux, France.
R Soc Open Sci. 2025 May 21;12(5):242175. doi: 10.1098/rsos.242175. eCollection 2025 May.
Previous work suggests that target selection during visual foraging is achieved through competition between different factors (e.g. proximity, priming, value) that orient attention towards one of the possible targets. However, this research has mainly involved simple stimuli such as coloured dots. Here, we investigated whether target selection is sensitive to the emotional content of the stimuli during visual foraging, using real-world photographs eliciting negative, neutral or positive emotions. Moreover, based on results from single-target visual search, we examined how participants' trait anxiety influences foraging behaviour. Seventy-five observers completed three foraging tasks corresponding to three emotional-valence conditions (positive, neutral, negative). The task was to select all the targets (pre-specified emotional images) as fast as possible while ignoring neutral distractors. Observers' foraging strategy (i.e. selection order, number of switches between target types) and performance (i.e. selection times, number of distractor selections) were measured. We also assessed participants' trait anxiety. The results revealed that negative emotional stimuli significantly influenced both foraging strategy and performance. Furthermore, the effect of negative emotion on foraging performance was amplified for participants with high trait anxiety. These findings suggest that emotional characteristics of both targets and participants contribute to target selection during visual foraging.
先前的研究表明，视觉觅食过程中的目标选择是通过不同因素（如接近度、启动效应、价值）之间的竞争实现的，这些因素会将注意力导向其中一个可能的目标。然而，这项研究主要涉及彩色点等简单刺激。在这里，我们使用引发负面、中性或正面情绪的真实世界照片，研究了视觉觅食过程中目标选择是否对刺激的情感内容敏感。此外，基于单目标视觉搜索的结果，我们考察了参与者的特质焦虑如何影响觅食行为。75名观察者完成了与三种情绪效价条件（积极、中性、消极）相对应的三项觅食任务。任务是尽快选择所有目标（预先指定的情感图像），同时忽略中性干扰项。测量了观察者的觅食策略（即选择顺序、目标类型之间的切换次数）和表现（即选择时间、干扰项选择次数）。我们还评估了参与者的特质焦虑。结果显示，负面情绪刺激显著影响了觅食策略和表现。此外，对于特质焦虑程度高的参与者，负面情绪对觅食表现的影响会放大。这些发现表明，目标和参与者的情感特征都有助于视觉觅食过程中的目标选择。
