The emotional modulation of attention by conditioned stimuli: cognitive and neural mechanisms

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The ways in which we interact with the world, and even the ways in which we see the world, depend largely on how we focus our attention.  For example, when attention is distracted, people often fail to notice even salient objects or events that appear right before their eyes.  Many studies have investigated the ways in which attention is deployed and how it facilitates cognitive processing of abstract shapes and symbols.  Such stimuli have been used because they are convenient and easy to study. However, humans live in a world laden with emotional meaning; the traditional use of meaningless stimuli (e.g., patterns and colors) does not reflect this fact and thus can tell us little about how people use emotional information to guide their attention to potentially important aspects of their environments.       Dr. Stephen Smith and his colleagues have initiated a series of studies to identify how emotion influences our attention.  Using a combination of laboratory tests and brain-imaging studies, Dr. Smith is examining (1) what types of stimuli capture and hold attention, (2) what cognitive processes are related to this emotional modulation of attention, and (3) what brain areas are involved in these processes.  A critical component of this research is the fact that rather than simply focusing on innately emotional stimuli such as faces, the research will examine the degree to which learned emotional associations affect our ability to encode information.  Given that many of our emotional experience are learned associations between a stimulus (e.g., a car) and an emotional outcome (e.g., an accident), understanding how these associations influence attention is very important.  The results will provide new insight into emotion-attention interactions, and will be of interest both to cognitive-neuroscience researchers and to more applied clinical practitioners.