On the malleability of automatic attentional biases: effects of feature-specific attention allocation.
In two experiments, we examined the extent to which automatic attentional biases, as indexed by performance in the emotional Stroop task (Experiment 1) and the dot-probe task (Experiment 2), are modulated by feature-specific attention allocation. In both experiments, participants were encouraged to attend to either affective stimulus information (affective groups) or non-affective semantic stimulus information (non-affective groups). In both experiments, an attentional bias towards negative stimuli was found in the affective groups but not in the non-affective groups. In Experiment 1, we also observed an attentional bias towards non-affective semantic stimulus information in the non-affective group but not in the affective groups. We argue that these effects are due to a modulation of automatic stimulus processing by feature-specific attention allocation. Our data demonstrate that automatic attentional biases toward negative stimuli are not unconditional but instead depend on the relevance of negative information. Moreover, the results of Experiment 1 suggest that attention is automatically biased towards non-affective stimulus dimensions that are currently relevant.
Department of Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium. Tom.Everaert@UGent.be
Tom
T
Everaert
Adriaan
A
Spruyt
Jan
J
De Houwer
D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect; D001288:Attention; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D012660:Semantics; D057190:Stroop Test; D014796:Visual Perception