Affective modulation of memory-based guidance in visual search: Dissociative role of positive and negative emotions

Emotions can either facilitate or hamper the allocation of attention and the extraction of statistical regularities from perceptual input. In the present study, we investigated whether context memory of spatial target-distractor relations in visual search is influenced by task-irrelevant affective stimuli. In Phase 1 of the study, positive, negative, or neutral images (randomly selected) were presented in the background of a given repeated (fixed target-distractor arrangement) or nonrepeated (random arrangement) search array. We found that the "contextual cueing" effect (RTs to nonrepeated minus repeated arrays) was enhanced for repeated displays associated with negative- (vs. neutral-) picture backgrounds, while it was substantially reduced for repeated displays paired with positive (vs. neutral) backgrounds. This emotional modulation of the contextual cueing effect remained intact even when the irrelevant affective background images were removed from the search displays in Phase 2 of the study. Together, these findings suggest that emotions have valence-specific effects on attention that influence the encoding of spatial target-distractor relations and thus the build-up of spatial context memory from the visual search environment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).