title: Emotional conditioning to masked stimuli and modulation of visuospatial attention.
abstract: Two studies investigated the effects of conditioning to masked stimuli on visuospatial attention. During the conditioning phase, masked snakes and spiders were paired with a burst of white noise, or paired with an innocuous tone, in the conditioned stimulus (CS)+ and CS- conditions, respectively. Attentional allocation to the CSs was then assessed with a visual probe task, in which the CSs were presented unmasked (Experiment 1) or both unmasked and masked (Experiment 2), together with fear-irrelevant control stimuli (flowers and mushrooms). In Experiment 1, participants preferentially allocated attention to CS+ relative to control stimuli. Experiment 2 suggested that this attentional bias depended on the perceived aversiveness of the unconditioned stimulus and did not require conscious recognition of the CSs during both acquisition and expression.
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England. john.beaver@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk
authors.forename: John D
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: Beaver
authors.forename: Karin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Mogg
authors.forename: Brendan P
authors.initials: BP
authors.lastname: Bradley
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001143:Arousal; D001245:Association Learning; D001288:Attention; D002755:Choice Behavior; D003214:Conditioning, Classical; D004644:Emotions; D005239:Fear; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009949:Orientation; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010470:Perceptual Masking