In an era marked by frequent natural disasters, pandemics, and conflicts, it is increasingly important to understand how these events impact cognitive processes. New research, published in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, investigated the influence of crises on attention, focusing on the emotional attentional blink (EAB), where emotionally significant stimuli divert attention from target tasks.
“I had been studying temporal attentional capture by emotional stimuli, specifically using attentional blink (AB) and EAB paradigms, for around 6 years when I came up with the idea,” said Lindsay Santacroce (@LASantacroce22), PhD, a postdoctoral research fellow at Toronto Metropolitan University.
“Research had examined personally relevant traumatic stimuli in the EAB with specific extreme populations (e.g., combat-related stimuli with veterans experiencing PTSD), but that largely ignored the general population experiencing a widespread crisis event. Being in Houston, Texas at the time, I had a unique opportunity to utilize images related to Hurricane Harvey, which devastated the area a few years prior. In addition, we were currently in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, and thus there were a lot of ‘buzzwords’ going around that could potentially capture attention out of context. So I wanted to see if, in the absence of clinical diagnoses, these crisis-related stimuli would capture attention in the EAB.”
Experiment 1 utilized an EAB and Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) task. The sample comprised 40 students of diverse backgrounds, who had experienced Hurricane Harvey firsthand. The task involved identifying fruit images amid distractors of varying emotional valence, including images of Houston pre- and post-Hurricane Harvey, across different temporal lags between distractor and target images.
Participants first completed a demographics survey and calibration tasks to standardize the visual presentation, followed by practice trials to familiarize themselves with the task. The experiment consisted of 600 trials over 20 conditions, with each session lasting about 1.5 hours. This method aimed to assess the potential long-term stress effects from Hurricane Harvey on cognitive attention among affected individuals, four years after the event.
Unpleasant images induced a conventional EAB effect, whereas stimuli related to Hurricane Harvey produced an ambiguous response, suggesting a weaker, if any, EAB effect compared to conventional emotional stimuli. The stress-induced EAB by Hurricane Harvey images was significantly smaller than that evoked by unpleasant stimuli. This indicates that, even in the face of a major natural disaster, the attentional capture by crisis-related stimuli was not as strong as expected among students.
Experiment 2 explored the impact of COVID-related, taboo, and neutral words on attention in 40 University of Houston students using an EAB paradigm with word stimuli. Experiment 2 likewise utilized an RSVP task, consisting of 360 trials where participants identified fruit target words amidst different distractors across 12 conditions. The COVID-19 words, deemed more negative and arousing, were used to measure attentional shifts amidst emotionally significant distractors, to examine the cognitive effects of current crises compared to conventional emotional stimuli.
Santacroce and colleagues found that while taboo words significantly triggered an EAB, indicating strong attentional shifts, COVID-related words did not produce a similar effect. Thus, stimuli associated with the ongoing COVID-19 crisis had a limited impact on disrupting attention among university students, compared to the pronounced effect of conventional emotionally charged stimuli.
The researcher explained: “Stimuli associated with a widespread crisis event do not increase the EAB in a general (specifically college student) population. So these stimuli are not salient to capture temporal attention the way that generally unpleasant stimuli (i.e., images of gore or taboo curse words) do. This could indicate that, in the real world, crisis stimuli don’t really ‘trigger’ capture/rumination like one might expect.”
“We only used college students from the University of Houston, so it’s possible that other populations/crisis events could capture attention. For example, I was interested in also including an experiment using fire images in a population from California where there were raging wildfires. However, this was not feasible at the time. I honestly think the results would remain, but the possibility is there.”
Are there questions that still need answers? Santacroce said that “it would be interesting to see if there is a difference between those who were more heavily affected by the crises compared to those with more mild experiences. For example, those who lost their house in Hurricane Harvey versus those who just saw flooding in their streets or those who lost someone close to them from COVID-19 versus someone who never caught it. We could also look at different populations or crisis events.”
“Given that widespread crises are going to be increasing over the years, it’s important to understand how they would affect the general population. Attentional capture is a great way to examine this because it shows how reminders of crises could affect our ability to complete/focus on daily tasks.”
The research, “Crisis‑related stimuli do not increase the emotional attentional blink in a general university student population”, was authored by Lindsay A. Santacroce and Benjamin J. Tamber‑Rosenau.