Reward Influences Temporal Attention:Evidence From Emotion-Induced Blindness And Emotional Attention Blink

Temporal attention is the choice of attention reflected in the temporal dimension.Emotional Attention Blink(EAB)and Emotion-induced Blindness(EIB)are two classic phenomena of emotional stimuli regulating time attention selection.Both of them reflect the influence of emotional input on multi-item attention selection and working memory consolidation under the condition of limited central resources,and both have the characteristics of emotional attention bias and unconscious functional blindness.However,there are differences between the two.EIB reflects the temporal attention phenomenon caused by stimulus-driven processing,while EAB is the temporal attention phenomenon caused by goal-driven processing.On the other hand,rewards can induce the intrinsic motivation of individuals and play an important role in their time attention.The researchers found that in the single task rapid sequence vision paradigm,if emotional faces were used as emotional stimuli,the association of different emotional stimuli with rewards would interfere with target recognition.However,no studies have explored whether rewards affect temporal attention in classical EIB tasks,and whether the effects of rewards on temporal attention can be extended from EIB tasks to EAB tasks.Therefore,this study intends to use experimental means to explore the effect of reward on temporal attention in different experimental tasks.In experiment 1,the classical EIB task was used to investigate the effect of reward feedback associated with different emotional stimuli on target recognition.The experiment adopted a two-factor mixed experimental design of 3(reward type: negative reward group/neutral reward group/no reward group)×2(emotion type of disturbing pictures: negative/neutral)to manipulate the relationship between interference stimulus and reward.Specifically,for the reward group,different emotional interfering stimuli were associated with rewards in the experiment,and each group was informed before the experiment that if there was a negative(or neutral)interfering stimulus in the experiment,the correct identification of the target stimulus would get bonus points.They were also told that the best way to get a reward was to ignore distracting stimuli;For the non-reward group,the subjects did not get reward-related information,only need to identify the target stimulus.The experimental results showed that combining negative or neutral interference stimuli with rewards could significantly reduce the target recognition accuracy of subjects.Experiment 2 further explored the effect of reward on temporal attention in the classical EAB task.In experiment 2,3(reward group: negative reward group/neutral reward group/no reward group)×2(T1 emotion type: negative/neutral)×2(T2 lag level:lag2/lag8)three-factor mixed experimental design,by manipulating the correlation between goal 1(T1)and reward,to explore the influence of reward and different emotion T1 association on the attention choice of second-stage goal 2(T2).In the experiment,the first task of the subjects was to judge the emotion type of T1.For the subjects in the reward group,they were told before the experiment that if T1 was negative(or neutral),they would get bonus points for correctly identifying T2.For the non-reward group,the subjects did not get relevant information about the reward,and only needed to identify two target stimuli.The experimental results showed that when different emotionality T1 was associated with reward,the second-stage target recognition accuracy of subjects was significantly reduced.The experimental results show that the effect of reward on temporal attention not only occurs in EIB tasks,but also in classical EAB tasks.According to previous studies,whether EAB effect is produced or not is related to the task type of T1.Specifically,recognition of emotional T1 further impaired attention selection for T2 only when the task requirement of T1 was related to its emotional characteristics.Therefore,in experiment 3,on the basis of experiment 2,the variant of EAB task is used to further explore whether the association of rewards with different emotional T1 will still affect the recognition of T2 when T1 task requirements are unrelated to their emotional characteristics.The experimental design of experiment 3was the same as that of experiment 2.Only the experimental requirements of task 1were changed,that is,the subjects were asked to judge whether T1 was human or animal.The results showed that EAB effect did not appear under the condition of no reward.When different emotionality T1 was associated with the reward,the recognition accuracy of the target in the second stage would be affected,and the EAB effect that had disappeared before would appear again.In summary,the results of this study prove that:(1)Value-driven attention capture triggered by rewards can significantly affect temporal attention processing,and this effect can be reflected in both stimulus-driven temporal attention represented by EIB and goal-driven temporal attention represented by EAB and its variants.(2)In both EIB and EAB task phenomena,value-driven attention capture induced by reward can change the original emotional attention selection,showing special attention guidance.