Capturing and holding attention: The impact of emotional words in rapid serial visual presentation

Memory & Cognition, Jan 2008

When two masked, to-be-attended targets are presented within approximately 500 msec of each other, accurate report of the second target (T2) suffers more than when targets are presented farther apart in time—an attentional blink (AB). In the present study, the AB was found to be larger when taboo words were presented as a first target (T1), as compared with the AB found when emotionally neutral, negative, or positive words were presented as T1, suggesting that taboo words received preferential attentional processing. Comparable results were also obtained when taboo words were presented as to-be-ignored distractors in single-target rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). Arousal, but not valence, ratings of the emotional words predicted accuracy on subsequent targets in both dual- and single-task RSVP. Recognition memory for taboo words accounted fully for the negative relationships between arousal ratings and accuracy on subsequent targets, suggesting that arousal-triggered changes in attentional allocation influenced encoding of taboo words at the time they were encountered.

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Capturing and holding attention: The impact of emotional words in rapid serial visual presentation

KAREN J. MATHEWSON 0 KAREN M. ARNELL 0 CRAIG A. MANSFIELD 0 0 Brock University , St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada When two masked, to-be-attended targets are presented within approximately 500 msec of each other, accurate report of the second target (T2) suffers more than when targets are presented farther apart in timean attentional blink (AB). In the present study, the AB was found to be larger when taboo words were presented as a first target (T1), as compared with the AB found when emotionally neutral, negative, or positive words were presented as T1, suggesting that taboo words received preferential attentional processing. Comparable results were also obtained when taboo words were presented as to-be-ignored distractors in single-target rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). Arousal, but not valence, ratings of the emotional words predicted accuracy on subsequent targets in both dual- and single-task RSVP. Recognition memory for taboo words accounted fully for the negative relationships between arousal ratings and accuracy on subsequent targets, suggesting that arousal-triggered changes in attentional allocation influenced encoding of taboo words at the time they were encountered. - In a typical rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm, stimuli are presented rapidly (approximately 10/sec) one at a time in the same central location. Participants are usually able to detect or identify a specified single target with a high degree of accuracy (Raymond, Shapiro, & Arnell, 1992). However, they have difficulty reporting the second of two targets if the second target (T2) is presented within about 500 msec of the first target (T1)an effect known as the attentional blink (AB; Broadbent & Broadbent, 1987; Raymond et al., 1992). No AB is observed if participants are instructed to ignore T1 and report only T2 (Raymond et al., 1992), or if the targets are presented farther apart in time. According to prominent two-stage bottleneck models of the AB (Chun & Potter, 1995; Jolicur, 1999), processing a target to the level of identification requires two discrete stages: (1) processing and representation of stimulus features and (2) sustained attention, resulting in consolidation of stimulus identity sufficient for recognition or report.1 While the first stage occurs automatically, the second requires substantial attentional resources and requires more time to complete. The time- and attention-consuming nature of stage two means that if T2 arrives before consolidation of T1 is completed, its own consolidation must wait for presently occupied attentional resources to become available (Chun & Potter, 1995; Jolicur, 1999). If processing of T1 outlasts T2s brief representation before it is overwritten by the subsequent stimulus in the RSVP stream, then encoding of T2 will fail, and T2 report accuracy will be reduced. Thus, such AB theories predict that prolonged processing of T1 at the consolidation stage will result in poor accuracy for T2. Despite short stimulus exposures, there is evidence that word stimuli receive semantic analysis in RSVP during Stage 1 processing. For example, T2s that were blinked and unable to be reported were still able to prime semantically associated words presented after the RSVP stream (Shapiro, Driver, Ward, & Sorensen, 1997), and the semantic relationship between words in RSVP streams has been shown to influence target performance (Maki, Frigen, & Paulson, 1997). Barnard, Scott, Taylor, May, and Knightley (2004) showed that a to-be-ignored distractor word captured attention and reduced report accuracy for a subsequent target if the distractor word was semantically similar to the target category. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) have also shown fully intact N400s for blinked T2s, suggesting complete semantic analysis of T2s that could not be reported (Luck, Vogel, & Shapiro, 1996). Evidence for semantic activation of targets and distractors in RSVP streams has led researchers to investigate whether emotionally laden stimuli might receive preferential attentional processing when presented as RSVP targets or distractors. There is reason to suspect that emotionally laden words may receive preferential processing in RSVP; several paradigms have shown evidence for preferential processing for some emotional materials under some conditions. When using clinical populations, research with paradigms such as Stroop (see Williams, Mathews, & MacLeod, 1996, for a review) and dot probe (e.g., MacLeod, Mathews, & Tata, 1986) has demonstrated that clinical participants exhibit a compelling bias to attend to emotional words, particularly if they are consistent with their psychopathology. However, emotionally charged words show attentional effects less reliably in normal controls. In participant samples with no clinical psychopathology, sometimes emotionally charged words appear to be exempt from the usual attentional processing limitations, as they are able to capture attention in paradigms s (...truncated)


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Karen J. Mathewson, Karen M. Arnell, Craig A. Mansfield. Capturing and holding attention: The impact of emotional words in rapid serial visual presentation, Memory & Cognition, 2008, pp. 182-200, Volume 36, Issue 1, DOI: 10.3758/MC.36.1.182