Are emotional stimuli prioritised in visual awareness?

Abstract

Although various features of visual stimuli have been shown to affect access to awareness, it is still unclear whether and to what extent emotional stimuli have privileged access to visual awareness. We conducted three online experiments, using a breaking Repeated Masked Suppression (bRMS) paradigm, to assess whether positively and negatively valenced/high-arousal photographs would emerge from masking (break out of forward/backward masking by image-unique masks) faster than would neutral/low-arousal photographs. Experiment 1 found that positively-valenced high-arousal pictures were faster to break out of repeated masked suppression. Experiment 2 showed that this was not because such pictures were substantially more memorable. Experiment 3 used a verbal rather than pictorial method to check for accuracy of breakout, and found similar results to Experiment 1. We also found that various pictorial qualities had either no effect, or only a minor effect, on our results. Importantly, images of people and animals consistently showed the shortest breakout times, indicating that such stimuli might be especially available to conscious access. However, a difference in the distribution of images of people (fastest) and scenes (slowest) images across the valence categories may have also contributed to the overall shorter breakout times of positively-valenced images.