Abstracts Category : Other

The Temporal Limits of Human Selective Attention: The Role of Modality, Emotion, and Anxiety on the Ability to Keep Up with a Fast-Paced World

by Lindsay A Santacroce

Due to societys increasing dependency on electronic devices that convey rapidly displayed information, it is imperative to understand the limits of temporal attention. Previous studies have examined a momentary lapse in temporal attention, or attentional blink, and how it can be affected by emotional distractors or by the anxiety levels of participants, but have yet to introduce the modality of the distractor as a concomitant factor in AB deficits. The current study implements a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task, where participants of different anxiety levels were asked to report two green target words embedded in a rapid stream of white distractor words, while pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant stimuli of different modalities (words or images) acted as a single task-irrelevant distractor item. Results show that the presence of emotional images, specifically unpleasant, lead to an overall increase in AB deficits and that when compared to experiments with unpleasant image distractors, experiments with unpleasant word distractors showed an increased AB deficit. Additionally, the level of participants anxiety scores inversely predicted AB deficits when exposed to unpleasant word distractors only. Results emphasize the importance of the modality of emotional distractors in rapid streams and highlight role anxiety levels play on a lapse in temporal attention (AB). ( en )