title: When a bang makes you run away: spatial avoidance of threatening environmental sounds.
abstract: Environmental sounds can be powerful alarm signals. Hence, attentional orienting towards their location might occur extremely rapidly. Here, we used the beep probe task to investigate attentional biases to negative, positive and taboo sounds. While both left-presented negative and taboo sounds elicited attentional avoidance, taboo but not negative sounds triggered Inhibition of Return. Moreover, taboo sounds slowed participants' responses, whatever the sound and beep locations. Positive sounds had no effect. Interestingly, although spatial effects specific to taboo sounds were related to their disgusting nature, their non-spatial effects were linked to their shocking/surprising trait. This is the first evidence of emotional sounds' influence on spatial attentional orienting and of the involved emotional dimensions.
authors: Center for Research in Cognition and Neurosciences, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium, Avenue F.D. Roosevelt, 50, C.P.191, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium. jbertels@ulb.ac.be
authors: Julie
authors: J
authors: Bertels
authors: Régine
authors: R
authors: Kolinsky
authors: Déborah
authors: D
authors: Coucke
authors: José
authors: J
authors: Morais
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D001288:Attention; D001307:Auditory Perception; D004644:Emotions; D004924:Escape Reaction; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009949:Orientation; D013017:Sound Localization; D055815:Young Adult