Testing a goal-driven account of involuntary attentional capture by threat.

Brown, Chris Robert Harrison; Berggren, Nick; Forster, Sophie · 2019 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.1037/emo0000565

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Summary

This paper investigates whether involuntary attentional capture by threat-laden stimuli is driven by bottom-up perceptual salience or top-down goal-directed processes. Traditional models of attention distinguish between goal-driven (endogenous) and stimulus-driven (exogenous) mechanisms, yet it remains unclear how affective stimuli, such as threats, fit into this dichotomy. While earlier theories posited that threat capture is unconditional and stimulus-driven, recent evidence suggests it may be contingent on task relevance. The authors aim to provide direct experimental evidence for a causal role of voluntary goals in involuntary capture by testing whether adopting a specific search goal induces capture by irrelevant distractors matching that goal. To test this hypothesis, the researchers combined the “contingent capture” paradigm with the “emotion-induced blindness” (EIB) task across six experiments. Participants viewed a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream of neutral animal images and were instructed to identify a target defined by its affective category (either “cute” or “threatening”). Crucially, distractor images (animals or emotional faces) were presented in peripheral, task-irrelevant locations, ensuring that any attentional shift was involuntary. The design allowed for a direct manipulation of search goals, determining whether distractors congruent with the current goal (e.g., a threatening distractor during a threat search) captured attention more than incongruent or neutral distractors. In Experiment 1, using animal stimuli, results demonstrated that involuntary attentional capture occurred only when the distractor category matched the active search goal. Participants showed significantly reduced accuracy in identifying targets when presented with goal-congruent affective distractors (both cute and threatening) compared to neutral distractors. Conversely, goal-incongruent affective distractors produced no significant interference, with Bayesian analyses confirming these null effects reflected an absence of capture rather than statistical insensitivity. Experiment 2 attempted to generalize this effect by using emotional faces as distractors while searching for threatening animals. However, no significant capture effects were observed, suggesting that goal-driven capture may not automatically generalize across different stimulus categories (e.g., from animals to faces) despite shared affective content. These findings provide direct evidence that involuntary attentional capture by threat is not an unconditional, stimulus-driven process but is instead governed by top-down goal settings. The results support a goal-driven account where attentional capture by irrelevant threat stimuli is induced by the adoption of a search goal for that specific category. This challenges traditional views of threat processing as purely bottom-up and suggests that affective capture can be accommodated within existing models of selective attention as a form of contingent capture. The implications extend to understanding clinical disorders like anxiety, where heightened threat detection may reflect adaptive, goal-driven attentional settings rather than fixed perceptual biases.

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• attention selective divided