Attentional Guidance by Emotional Salience

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Humans live in a world laden with affective meaning; yet, traditional research on attentional deployment relies largely on the presentation of meaningless stimuli (e.g., sudden onsets and unique colors). Evidence for attentional biases to emotional stimuli comes from work with clinically anxious patients, but these reports have frequently forgone careful consideration of important distinctions, such as those between reflexive and voluntary attention shifts, transient and sustained attention components, and spatial and temporal attention. Here, a range of experiments is designed to elucidate the mechanisms underlying emotion-based attentional biases. For example, the degree to which emotional stimuli capture temporal attention will be explored through the use of an "attentional blink" paradigm. Implicit measures of attention capture will be obtained through spatial cueing tasks, and by measuring reaction times and accuracy in response to neutral and emotional stimuli. Conclusions will be informed by neuroimaging. For example, direct thalamic-amygdala connections suggest that emotional stimuli may be processed without attention, as would be implied should amygdala activation occur without evidence for attention capture. Also, difficulty in ignoring emotional stimuli should be reflected in anterior cingulate cortex activation. This research will help to lay bare the functional "anatomy" by which emotion-based attentional biases occur.