The influence of perceptual load on behavioral interference of simultaneous positive and negative emotional distractors.

Abstract

Prioritized processing of emotional stimuli could be detrimental in contexts where the affective information is not goal relevant. To examine whether the behavioral interference of task-irrelevant emotional stimuli depends on the primary task demands, several past studies varied the perceptual load, thus manipulating the resources available for processing emotional distractors. In particular, some previous work reported valence asymmetry in the effects of high (vs. low) perceptual load where negative distraction was reduced but positive distraction was resistant to the perceptual load manipulation. However, previous studies have investigated the impact of perceptual load on attentional capture by positive and negative distractors in isolation. Given real-life scenarios where positive and negative emotional stimuli co-occur, it becomes essential to understand how perceptual load modulates the behavioral interference of simultaneous positive and negative distractors. To address this critical gap, we conducted three behavioral experiments using a letter-search task involving low and high perceptual load, during which simultaneous positive-negative, positive-positive, negative-negative, and neutral-neutral emotional scene distractors were presented. We tested several competing hypotheses regarding how high (relative to low) perceptual load could impact the attentional capture of simultaneous emotional distractors. Across three experiments, in the reaction time data, we consistently found evidence that during high (relative to low) perceptual load, the interference effects of simultaneous emotional distractors were diminished regardless of their valence combination. Our findings do not support the proposed special status of positive distractors under high perceptual load and instead indicate that the effects of perceptual load on simultaneous emotional distractors are valence insensitive.