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Updated: Jul 11, 2026

The Emotional Stroop Task: Assessing Cognitive Performance under Exposure to Emotional Content
Published on: June 29, 2016
Emotional and neutral scenes in competition: orienting, efficiency, and identification
Manuel G Calvo1, Lauri Nummenmaa, Jukka Hyönä
1Department of Cognitive Psychology, Universidad de La Laguna, 38205 Tenerife, Spain. mgcalvo@ull.es
Abstract:
To investigate preferential processing of emotional scenes competing for limited attentional resources with neutral scenes, prime pictures were presented briefly (450 ms), peripherally (5.2 degrees away from fixation), and simultaneously (one emotional and one neutral scene) versus singly. Primes were followed by a mask and a probe for recognition. Hit rate was higher for emotional than for neutral scenes in the dual- but not in the single-prime condition, and A' sensitivity decreased for neutral but not for emotional scenes in the dual-prime condition. This preferential processing involved both selective orienting and efficient encoding, as revealed, respectively, by a higher probability of first fixation on--and shorter saccade latencies to--emotional scenes and by shorter fixation time needed to accurately identify emotional scenes, in comparison with neutral scenes.
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