Characterizing the effects of emotional distraction on sustained attention and subsequent memory: A novel emotional gradual onset continuous performance task.

This study examines the impact of emotional distraction on sustained attention using a novel gradual onset continuous performance task (gradCPT). Sustained attention is a foundational cognitive process, vulnerable to both internal (endogenous) and external (exogenous) disruptions. Reliable, validated paradigms to assess internal sources of variation in sustained attention have been used to characterize basic aspects of attention as well as individual differences and neurobiological mechanisms. However, sustained attention can also be disrupted by external distraction, especially highly salient distractors, due to their affective and/or arousing nature. Markedly less work has been conducted to develop reliable and validated paradigms to study these effects on sustained attention. This study introduces a novel task, the emogradCPT, to characterize the impact of emotional distractors (background images) on the ability to sustain attention during an emotionally neutral task (digit discrimination task). Across two experiments and three rounds of data collection, we demonstrate that emotionally negative distractors robustly and reliably disrupt ongoing ability to sustain attention, reflected in reduced accuracy, and slower RTs, relative to neutral, positive, and no distractor conditions. Further, we validated the task by correlating objective and subjective measures of distraction, as well as demonstrating the impact of these distractors on downstream memory encoding and affect. Making these data and tools publicly available, we encourage the use of this paradigm to inform future basic, clinical, and neuroimaging studies of affective interactions with ongoing goal-directed attentional processes.