Broad attention does not buffer the impact of emotionally salient stimuli on performance

ABSTRACT

It has been claimed that a broad attentional breadth buffers the impact of negative stimuli on human perception and cognition. Here we identify issues with the research on which this claim is based, and then rigorously test the claim. To induce narrow versus broad attentional breadth participants attended to the local versus global elements of Navon stimuli, and to investigate the impact of emotionally salient stimuli on performance we measured the effect of task-irrelevant stimuli of varying emotional salience (negative, neutral, or positive) on task performance. Across a series of experiments, we found that the Navon stimuli were effective in inducing different attentional breadths, and that both negative and positive task-irrelevant stimuli slowed responses relative to neutral stimuli, but that the magnitude of this emotion-induced slowing was invariant to whether attentional breadth was broad or narrow. This indicates that a broad attentional breadth did not buffer against the effect of either negative or positive emotionally salient stimuli. These results challenge the claim the broadening attentional breadth protects against the impact of emotionally salient stimuli.

KEYWORDS:

• emotion
• attention
• attentional breadth
• broad attention
• global attention

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Raw data are available here: https://osf.io/n9kq5/.

Notes

1 Note that the Size x Valence interaction in Experiment 1 of Goodhew and Edwards (2022) indicative of emotion-induced slowing following large images (the size used here) had a partial eta-squared of .070, which is slightly larger than a medium effect. This means that assuming a medium effect for this analysis is the more conservative approach to ensuring sufficient power.

2 The residuals of this ANOVA were not normally distributed. When a series of steps including transformation and outlier exclusion were used to make the residuals of this analysis not significantly different from normal, then the results were equivalent (see Supplementary Material for this analysis for Experiments 1, 3, 4, and 5, i.e. all Experiments where ANOVAs were performed).

3 Estimates of variability around the effect size for this Valence by Navon Level interaction are reported in the Supplementary Material for Experiments 1, 3, 4, and 5 (i.e. all Experiments where both these variables were included).

4 When Block Order (i.e. whether participants completed the Global or Local block first) was entered as a between-subjects factor in this ANOVA, this had no main effect or interaction with any other variables (ps > =  .105 and η_p²s < =  .042). This was true for subsequent Experiments, see Supplementary Material.

5 While normality was violated (Shapiro-Wilk p < .001), Wilcoxon signed-ranks tests showed the same result (p < .001, d = -.50)

6 While normality was violated, Wilcoxon signed-ranks tests showed the same result (p < .001, d = .64).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship (FT170100021) awarded to SCG.