Citation

Schmidt LJ, Belopolsky AV, Theeuwes J. Emotion 2014; 15(3): 329-338.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, American Psychological Association)

DOI

10.1037/emo0000041

PMID

25527964

Abstract

Several studies have shown that threatening stimuli are prioritized by the visual system. In the present study we investigated whether a stimulus associated with a threat of electrical shock attracts attention and accordingly interferes with the execution of voluntary eye movements to other locations. In 2 experiments, we showed that when a fear-conditioned and a neutral stimulus were presented simultaneously, voluntary saccades were initiated faster toward fear-conditioned compared with neutral stimuli. Moreover, saccades often erroneously went to the location of threat even when a saccade to a different location was required. This implies an automatic shift of attention to a fear-conditioned stimulus that interferes with saccade execution. The same pattern of results was found for a neutral stimulus that was always presented together with the fear-conditioned stimulus and consequently itself became associated with threat. The current results indicate that threatening stimuli attract visual attention and subsequently bias saccade target selection in a reflexive fashion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).

Language: en