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

我们与世界互动的方式，甚至我们看待世界的方式，在很大程度上取决于我们如何集中注意力。例如，当注意力分散时，人们往往没有注意到就在他们眼前出现的突出的物体或事件。许多研究调查了注意力的分配方式，以及它如何促进对抽象形状和符号的认知加工。这种刺激物之所以被使用，是因为它们方便且易于学习。然而，人类生活在一个充满情感意义的世界里；传统上使用毫无意义的刺激(如图案和颜色)并不能反映这一事实，因此无法告诉我们关于人们如何利用情感信息来引导他们的注意力到环境潜在重要方面的信息。

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.