title: Potential threat attracts attention and interferes with voluntary saccades.
abstract: Several studies have shown that threatening stimuli are prioritized by the visual system. In the present study we investigated whether a stimulus associated with a threat of electrical shock attracts attention and accordingly interferes with the execution of voluntary eye movements to other locations. In 2 experiments, we showed that when a fear-conditioned and a neutral stimulus were presented simultaneously, voluntary saccades were initiated faster toward fear-conditioned compared with neutral stimuli. Moreover, saccades often erroneously went to the location of threat even when a saccade to a different location was required. This implies an automatic shift of attention to a fear-conditioned stimulus that interferes with saccade execution. The same pattern of results was found for a neutral stimulus that was always presented together with the fear-conditioned stimulus and consequently itself became associated with threat. The current results indicate that threatening stimuli attract visual attention and subsequently bias saccade target selection in a reflexive fashion.
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive Psychology.
authors.forename: Lisette J
authors.initials: LJ
authors.lastname: Schmidt
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive Psychology.
authors.forename: Artem V
authors.initials: AV
authors.lastname: Belopolsky
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive Psychology.
authors.forename: Jan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Theeuwes
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003214:Conditioning, Classical; D005239:Fear / Q000502:physiology* / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology; D012438:Saccades / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult