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.