Effects of goal relevance on emotional attention: a systematic exploration

Emotional signals such as threat receive privileged access to awareness and modulate attention. Although some previous studies found that threat-related stimuli capture attention automatically, others have suggested instead that this capture actually depends on goals and hence is not fully automatic. The goal of this study was to assess whether the capture of attention by threat could be modulated by the goal-relevance of emotion or not, thereby informing about its putative automaticity. To address this question, we used a dot-probe task (DPT) with emotional faces in combination with induction trials meant to create a specific top-down attentional control set. In Experiment 1, which served as a baseline, emotion was never task-relevant. In Experiment 2, induction trials required to process the emotional cue shown prior to the target, yet with a focus on a non-emotional stimulus dimension (i.e. gender). In Experiment 3, participants were asked to attend to the emotional content of the cue during the induction trials, rendering it directly task and hence goal-relevant. In each experiment, eye-tracking was used to ascertain that the emotional cue as well as the subsequent target were processed with peripheral vision during this DPT. Moreover, we analyzed the data at the single trial level using a linear mixed model (LMM). Results showed (i) that fearful faces did not capture attention automatically and (ii) the activation of a specific attentional control set did not alter this outcome. However, when we combined the data of these three experiments into a common statistical model, results showed limited evidence in favor of the automatic capture of attention by fearful faces. We discuss these results using recent theoretical models according to which (negative) emotion can bias the competition for attention selection, independently from goals and physical salience.