Emotion-induced blindness elicits no lag-1 sparing

Date
2012
Authors
Kennedy, Briana
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Emotion-induced blindnessrefers to the impaired awareness for stimuli following an emotional stimulus. This effect bears resemblance to the attentional blink, a phenomenon in which detection of a second target is impaired if it appears soon after the first. Lag-1 sparing isa common characteristic observed in the attentional blink, such that targets just one position after the first targetare spared from the “blink” despite its close proximity. Recent emotion-induced blindness evidence suggests that emotion may act upon a set of different mechanisms (namely, a spatiotemporal competition between the distractor and target) that disrupt earlier than those of the attentional blink. The characteristic lag-1 sparing of the attentional blink, however, would not be predicted in this account for emotion-induced blindness. In the present study, the impaired response accuracy for targets presented one position after emotional distractors suggests that emotion-induced blindness elicits no lag-1 sparing. These results support spatiotemporal competition as a candidate mechanism underlying emotion-induced blindness, and suggest that emotion-induced blindness may result from different underlying mechanisms than those of the attentional blink.
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