A vigilance avoidance account of spatial selectivity in dual-stream emotion induced blindness

Emotion-induced blindness (EIB) is the impaired processing of neutral images when they are preceded in close temporal proximity by an emotive distractor. Dual-stream EIB contains two visual streams so the distractor and target can appear in either the same or opposite streams. Results from these studies suggest that the EIB effect is spatially localised. That is, for EIB to occur, the target must appear in the same stream as the distractor. An early spatially localised attention model has been proposed to account for these results. However, such an explanation is incompatible with the involvement of a high-level attentional-bottleneck in the processing of emotive stimuli. Here we propose and test an alternative account of the dual-stream EIB findings – specifically, a vigilance-avoidance (VA) account that is compatible with the high-level attentional bottleneck. We tested this model by using both negative and positive distractors and by measuring the trait anxiety of the participants. VA predicts that spatial localisation of the EIB effect would only occur with negative (threat-based) distractors with participants who have high levels of trait anxiety and that for all other conditions EIB would be obtained in both streams, while the early-localised-attention account predicts spatial localisation for both types of distractors, regardless of trait-anxiety levels. Results supported the VA model. This means that the results of EIB studies as a whole are consistent with conventional-attentional-bottleneck theories and therefore support the use of the EIB paradigm to investigate the impact of emotive stimuli on attentional processing.