TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2014//
TI  - Potential threat attracts attention and interferes with voluntary saccades
JO  - Emotion
A1  - Schmidt, Lisette J.
A1  - Belopolsky, Artem V.
A1  - Theeuwes, Jan
SP  - 329
EP  - 338
VL  - 15
IS  - 3
N2  - Several studies have shown that threatening stimuli are prioritized by the visual system. In the present study we investigated whether a stimulus associated with a threat of electrical shock attracts attention and accordingly interferes with the execution of voluntary eye movements to other locations. In 2 experiments, we showed that when a fear-conditioned and a neutral stimulus were presented simultaneously, voluntary saccades were initiated faster toward fear-conditioned compared with neutral stimuli. Moreover, saccades often erroneously went to the location of threat even when a saccade to a different location was required. This implies an automatic shift of attention to a fear-conditioned stimulus that interferes with saccade execution. The same pattern of results was found for a neutral stimulus that was always presented together with the fear-conditioned stimulus and consequently itself became associated with threat. The current results indicate that threatening stimuli attract visual attention and subsequently bias saccade target selection in a reflexive fashion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).<p />  <p>Language: en</p>
LA  - en
SN  - 1528-3542
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/emo0000041
ID  - ref1
ER  -