Author Description

In the emotion induced blindness (EIB) paradigm, participants search for a single target picture embedded in a rapidly presented sequence of "background" pictures. When the sequence also contains a task-irrelevant, emotional distractor appearing shortly before the target, awareness for the target is severely impaired (Most et al., 2005). This temporary "blindness" for the target is thought to reflect attention capture by an emotionally salient distractor which blocks access to attention by the target. However, there are also reasons to suspect that physical salience may play an important role in the initial attention capture process. The emotional pictures consist of close-ups of people and animals while the background pictures are wide-angle views of landscapes and cityscapes. These physical differences might result in pop-out of the distractor picture that is based on physical and not emotional salience. We investigated the role of physical salience-driven pop-out in EIB by comparing the typical EIB paradigm which uses dissimilar distractors with one in which the background pictures consist of people and animals in non-emotional settings. If emotional salience is the basis of attention capture in EIB, we should see similar amounts of target suppression in both conditions. Instead, we found that the EIB effect was largely eliminated in the similar background condition. A control experiment revealed that emotional information was still available in the similar background condition as the blink was restored when the emotional picture was externally cued for report by a salient red rectangle. These findings are clearly inconsistent with current theories of EIB (e.g., McHugo et al., 2013) which assume that initial attention capture is driven by emotional not physical salience.