title: Perceptual, not memorial, disruption underlies emotion-induced blindness.
abstract: Emotion-induced blindness refers to impaired awareness of stimuli appearing in the temporal wake of an emotionally arousing stimulus (S. B. Most, Chun, Widders, & Zald, 2005). In previous emotion-induced blindness experiments, participants withheld target responses until the end of a rapid stream of stimuli, even though each target appeared in the middle of the stream. The resulting interval between the targets' offset and participants' initiation of a response leaves open the possibility that emotion-induced blindness reflects a failure to encode or maintain target information in memory rather than a failure of perception. In the present study, participants engaged in a typical emotion-induced blindness task but initiated a response immediately upon seeing each target. Emotion-induced blindness was nevertheless robust. This suggests that emotion-induced blindness is not attributable to the delay between awareness of a target and the initiation of a response, but rather reflects the disruptive impact of emotional distractors on mechanisms driving conscious perception.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716-2577, USA.
authors.forename: Briana L
authors.initials: BL
authors.lastname: Kennedy
authors.forename: Steven B
authors.initials: SB
authors.lastname: Most
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D001143:Arousal; D001288:Attention; D001364:Awareness; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011930:Reaction Time; D055815:Young Adult