Capturing and holding attention: The impact of emotional words in rapid serial visual presentation
KAREN J. MATHEWSON
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KAREN M. ARNELL
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CRAIG A. MANSFIELD
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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.
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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)