Foveal and Peripheral Processing of Emotional Faces in an Attentional Blink Task

The attentional blink (AB) paradigm was used to assess the effect of emotional stimuli (angry, neutral) and location (fovea, periphery) on early visual attention in neurotypicals. The attentional blink is a lapse in perceptual awareness during the rapid presentation of stimuli within a 200-400ms time lag between the two targets. Certain aspects limit the AB effect, as they do a better job of catching our attention, with emotional stimuli as the second target being one of them. In addition, almost all past AB studies have focused on the fovea, and little work has been done in the periphery until now. During an attentional blink task, participants had a higher Target 2 accuracy when stimuli were presented in the fovea. Emotion showed unexpected results, with neutral faces leading to a higher accuracy than angry faces. Both emotion and location showed the expected attentional blink pattern. Introduction Our attention and visual processing of the world is thought to be broken down into two unique stages (Broadbent and Broadbent 1987; Chun and Potter 1995). Stage one, or early processing, allows us to rapidly take-in input and unconsciously categorize the information in preparation for later processing. The second stage is limited in attentional capacity, and chooses what we are actually conscious of based on the input from stage one. This stage has an attentional bottleneck, as there is too much stimuli in the world to take in. Not everything that we visually process is consciously reported, or not everything that makes it through stage one of processing makes it into stage two, and one way to explore these stages of attentional processing is through the attentional blink (AB) paradigm.