Conditioned emotional cueing of spatial attentional shifts in a go/no-go RT task

The influence of conditioned emotional arousal on selective attention was evaluated in a go/no-go version of Posner's covert attention spatial orienting task (Posner et al., 1982). Ten males and 10 females participated in the study, which consisted of two phases; an initial conditioning phase and a subsequent attention phase. In the conditioning phase, the Conditioning group received a 90-dB white noise unconditioned stimulus (UCS) contingent with presentations of a frame-lit rectangle, which thus became a conditioned stimulus (CS+), while a completely-lit rectangle was never paired with the noise and became a CS-. The Control group received non-contingent presentations of the noise and the two rectangles. In the attention phase, both groups participated in a go/no-go version of the attention orienting task, where targets were cued by both the CS+ and the CS-. Half of the subjects in both the Conditioning and the Control group were instructed to respond only to targets cued by the CS+ (go cue) and ignore targets cued by the CS- (no-go cue). The other half of the subjects responded to targets cued by the CS- and ignored targets cued by CS+. The Conditioning group identified targets at the opposite location of the CS+ significantly faster than targets at the same location. The emotional salience of the cue thus reversed the typical cost of shifting attention to targets outside the cued location.