Orienting to exogenous cues and attentional bias to affective pictures reflect separate processes

On the basis of psychophysiological research it has been argued that pleasant and unpleasant pictures inhibit orienting to abrupt startle stimuli. Converging psychophysical evidence was sought for this finding using a modified version of the spatial precueing paradigm (Posner, 1980). Specifically, exogenous cues were presented to the left and right of neutral, pleasant and unpleasant picture stimuli. In contrast to the experimental hypothesis, pleasant and unpleasant pictures failed to affect attention to exogenous cues despite slowing overall reaction times in comparison to neutral pictures. This null finding was replicated in a further experiment where rate arousal was varied within the pleasant and unpleasant picture groups. However, unpleasant pictures produced more task interference than pleasant pictures and highly arousing pictures produced more interference than pictures rated low in arousal.