Attentional Blink for Detecting Emotions

Post date: Oct 15, 2009 6:16:57 AM

Poster presented at the 50^th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society in Boston, MA.

Abstract: Two experiments were conducted to examine the attentional blink for facial emotions. In the first experiment, happy faces were used as the first target. Fear faces were used as the first target in the second experiment. Distractors were either consistent with the facial emotion (e.g., puppies for happy), inconsistent with the facial emotion (e.g., snake), or neutral. The second target was presented between one (70 msec) and six (420 msec) items after the first target. Subjects were able to accurately detect the second target at all delays regardless of the emotional content of the distractors. The results suggest that emotional facial expressions may not exhibit an attentional blink. Instead, this information may either be processed pre-attentively or outside of typical attentional processing.