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Updated: Aug 9, 2026

Central and Divided Visual Field Presentation of Emotional Images to Measure Hemispheric Differences in Motivated Attention
Published on: November 16, 2017
Emotion facilitates perception and potentiates the perceptual benefits of attention
Elizabeth A Phelps1, Sam Ling, Marisa Carrasco
1Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science, New York University, NY 10003, USA.
Abstract:
Does emotion affect how people see? We investigated the effects of emotion and attention, as well as their conjoint effect, on contrast sensitivity, a dimension of early vision. We manipulated the emotional valence and the attentional distribution of cues preceding a target stimulus and asked observers to judge the orientation of the target as contrast varied. This study provides the first behavioral evidence that (a) emotion enhances contrast sensitivity irrespective of attention and (b) emotion potentiates the effect of attention on contrast sensitivity.
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