Out of sight, out of mind: Spatial cueing reduces the attentional cost of emotional distractors in emotion-induced blindness.

Abstract

Emotional distractors significantly impact our goal-driven tasks, as demonstrated by the phenomenon of emotion induced blindness (EIB) and developing effective strategies to mitigate its impact has proven to be difficult. This study applied theoretical insights from spatial cueing studies to address the adverse impact of emotional distractors on EIB. We hypothesized that directing attention away from the distractor location via spatial cues would reduce the EIB. To test this, we used a cueing paradigm within the rapid serial visual presentation task, where the target was always cued correctly, but the distractor was only cued correctly 50% of the time. Results revealed a significant three-way interaction between cue validity, emotional valence, and stimulus-onset asynchrony. Specifically, emotional distractors produced less interference when they appeared in an invalidly cued location, supporting the hypothesis that spatially redirecting attention away from emotional distractors can reduce their impact on subsequent target processing. This effect was observed only for emotional distractors and not for neutral ones, highlighting the unique attentional "stickiness" of emotional stimuli. This study is the first to demonstrate that spatial cueing can reduce EIB and, importantly, offers novel evidence for an interaction between spatial and temporal attention in the presence of emotional stimuli.