Exogenous (automatic) attention to emotional stimuli: a review

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Psychology
• Visual Attention

Background:

• Exogenous attention, crucial for detecting salient events, is typically studied using neutral stimuli.
• Emotional events are inherently salient and vital for a complete understanding of attention.

Purpose of the Study:

• To review studies on visual exogenous attention using emotional and neutral distractors.
• To investigate how emotional stimuli influence attention capture and processing.

Main Methods:

• Review of 55 experiments presenting emotional and neutral distractors alongside task targets.
• Qualitative and meta-analytic descriptions of behavioral and neural data.

Main Results:

• Emotional distractors capture exogenous attention significantly more than neutral distractors.
• Modulatory effects of distractor type, task, and individual differences were observed.
• Temporal and spatial neural information on attention subprocesses was provided.

Conclusions:

• Emotional stimuli play a critical role in modulating exogenous attention.
• Including emotional distractors is essential for comprehensive models of attention.
• Further research is needed on specific aspects of emotional attention capture.