Abstract
Emotionally charged stimuli inserted in rapid serial visual presentation of distractors impair subsequent target detection (emotion-induced blindness). In this study, in order to examine whether emotion-induced blindness stemmed from involuntary attentional capture based on the reaction of affective system, we employed subliminal affective habituation. Observers were instructed to identify three, simultaneously presented, alphabetical targets. Observers, the target detection was impaired when the emotional stimuli were presented 200ms before the target. On the other hand, after subliminal affective habituation, the target detection was not impaired by the negative emotional stimuli. Thus, these results revealed emotion-induced blindness was eliminated by prior subliminal affective habituation and suggested that emotion-induced blindness was attributable to the attentional dwelling on the emotional stimuli intervened by emotional valence processing in the affective system.
