Attention is Enhanced Prior to Anticipated Emotional or Neutral Stimuli

Post by Amanda McFarlan

What's the science?

We encounter many stimuli in our daily lives and must choose to attend to relevant stimuli while filtering out irrelevant ones. This is not always an easy task, especially in distracting environments. Researchers have focused on studying how distractions affect ensuing behaviour, but little is known about how we prepare for a distraction that we know is coming. This week in Psychological Science, Makovski and Chajut investigated how individuals prepare for anticipated distractions and whether they prepare differently depending on the distraction type.

How did they do it?

In the first experiment, participants performed a memory task, in which they were briefly shown an array with four differently coloured circles and asked to memorize it. This was followed by a designated period of retention during which participants were shown either a) no image at all or b) a neutral or threatening image, which they were instructed to ignore. Then, participants were presented with a colour probe and had to identify whether it was in the same position as it was in the memory array. In a subset of trials, a very small grey dot (‘dot probe’) appeared instead of the anticipated neutral or threatening image, and participants were asked to indicate when they detected the dot. 

In the second experiment, the methods remained mostly unchanged, except the dot probe appeared after the neutral or threatening images rather than before. Then, in a third experiment, the neutral and threatening images were exchanged for joyful and disgusting images respectively. Participants’ anxiety levels were measured prior to experiments 1 and 3 using the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory questionnaire.

What did they find?

The authors determined that memory performance was worse in the threatening image condition (compared to the no image and neutral image condition). However, participants were faster at detecting the dot probe when they anticipated being shown an image, regardless of the image category (neutral or threatening, joyful or disgusting). Although there was a trend suggesting that people with high anxiety suffered more from the threatening images compared to people with low anxiety, overall, anxiety levels did not influence the response time for detecting the dot probe. In experiment 2, the authors found that response time was greatly impaired when the dot probe appeared after a threatening image (instead of before) compared to after a neutral image or no image. Together, these findings suggest that, despite the effects of image contents (threatening versus non-threatening) on memory performance, preparation was unaffected by image contents.  

What’s the impact?

This study shows that participants were more attentive when they anticipated any type of  stimulus compared to when they were not anticipating a stimulus at all. This suggests that people prepare the same way for an anticipated stimulus regardless of the type of stimulus. Although emotional valence associated with the stimulus (e.g., threatening) and corresponding anxiety levels can have an impact on behavioural performance after the stimulus is presented, they do not affect the way we prepare for a stimulus before it is presented.

Makovski and Chajut. Preparing for the Worst: Attention is Enhanced Prior to Any Upcoming Emotional or Neutral Stimulus. Association for Psychological Science (2021). Access the original scientific publication here.