Revisiting Motivated Attentional Bias: Capture or Dwelling?

Previous research has reported that a disgust induction increases attentional bias toward cleanliness-related stimuli, interpreting this effect as motivationally driven attentional capture. A recent conceptual replication confirmed the moderation of attentional bias by emotional state but only when a discrimination task was used instead of the location task used in the original study. Both studies used a rather long cue-target onset asynchrony (CTOA) of 350 ms. In the present follow-up experiment, we manipulated CTOA (i.e., 100 ms vs. 350 ms) in a dot-probe task in a neutral mood context and used the same stimuli as in the recent replication. Although we were able to replicate the null effect for CTOA = 350 ms found in the control condition (no disgust) of the earlier studies, cleanliness-related stimuli elicited a significant positive attentional bias at CTOA = 100 ms. The presence of this early bias for cleanliness-related cues in the absence of a hygiene motivation, combined with the previously observed persistence of this bias under a disgust induction at the longer CTOA, suggests that motivation does not enhance initial attentional capture. Rather, it is consistent with prolonged attentional dwelling on goal-relevant stimuli. Taken together with previous findings, the present results might contribute to clarifying the mechanisms underlying motivated attentional bias and indicate that its primary effect lies in sustained attentional engagement rather than early capture.