Emotional salience changes the focus of spatial attention

The interaction of emotional stimulus processing and attentional mechanisms has become a topic of intensive investigation. The present study combined aversive conditioning with a spatial attention paradigm that by simultaneously recording event-related potentials (ERPs) allowed for accessing the distribution of auditory spatial attention. In an initial conditioning phase, seven spatial locations (conditioned stimuli; CS-) were associated with an emotionally neutral and one additional location (CS+) with an emotionally aversive sound (US). Four locations were in the left and the four remaining locations were in the right hemifield. During the testing phase, either frequent single bursts of noise or infrequent double noise bursts were presented in a random sequence from these eight locations. Task of the participants was to attend to the most leftward (in half of the blocks) or the most rightward location (other half of the blocks) in order to press a button to any deviant sound at that location. Spatial attention elicited the well-known increased fronto-centrally distributed negativity in the ERPs. The presence of an aversively conditioned location in the vicinity of the spatially attended location resulted in a broadening of the attentional focus at processing stages as early as 100 ms after stimulus onset. These results suggest that emotional and attentional processing interact at early stages of stimulus processing and change sensory processing of environmental input.