Can emotional singletons be suppressed?

Abstract

Emotional stimuli can capture our visual attention even when we are trying to ignore them. However, recent research shows that even highly physically salient stimuli can be prevented from capturing attention when presented at a suppressed location. The primary purpose of the current study was to test whether emotional pictures automatically capture attention and are capable of breaking through attentional suppression. ☐ Attention capture and suppression was tested with a paradigm using statistical learning with the additional singleton procedure (Wang & Theeuwes, 2018a, b). Participants discriminated a target in a display containing a physically salient, singleton distractor image that was either emotional or neutral. Distractor pictures were much more likely to occur in one location compared to other locations which proactively suppressed objects appearing in that location. ☐ RT results show that both emotional and neutral singletons appearing at non-suppressed, low probability locations captured attention with larger effects for emotional than neutral distractors. Both distractors appearing at the high probability location were suppressed, showing smaller interference effects, but emotional distractors continued to produce more interference than neutral. However, mouse tracking data indicates that the emotional interference effect in the high location was actually not due to spatial capture of attention. Spatial capture in the high location was actually suppressed but more time was consumed to suppress an emotional distractor compared to a neutral one. This suggests spatial attention capture by emotional salience is not automatic and can be completely suppressed. ☐ Keywords: emotional salience, attention capture, additional singleton, suppression, automaticity, mouse-tracking