Visual search is not blind to emotion

Gerritsen, Cory; Frischen, Alexandra; Blake, Andrew; Smilek, Daniel; Eastwood, John D. · 2008 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.3758/pp.70.6.1047

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Summary

This study investigates whether the visual system can detect the emotional valence of faces preattentively, thereby influencing the allocation of attention during visual search. The research addresses inconsistencies in prior literature regarding whether search efficiency for emotional faces is driven by emotional meaning or by physical properties of the stimuli. To resolve this, the authors employed a conditioning paradigm where identical neutral faces were assigned different emotional meanings (hostile or peaceful) to different groups of observers, effectively controlling for physical confounds. The study comprised three experiments using a visual search task. Participants searched for a target face among neutral distractors. Crucially, the target faces were physically identical across groups but had been conditioned to represent either "hostile" (negative valence) or "peaceful" (positive valence) meanings. The experimental design included variable set sizes (4, 7, 10, or 13 items) to measure search efficiency via reaction time (RT) slopes. To maximize the likelihood of observing preattentive effects, participants were instructed to use a "passive" search strategy, allowing targets to "pop out" rather than actively scanning. Additionally, conditioning was reinforced between search blocks to prevent extinction of the learned associations. Meta-analytic methods were applied to pool data across the three experiments to obtain a reliable estimate of the effect size. The results demonstrated that search for hostile faces was more efficient than for peaceful faces, as indicated by shallower RT slopes for hostile targets. This effect persisted despite the fact that the physical characteristics of the faces were identical across conditions, differing only in their conditioned emotional meaning. However, meta-analytic analysis revealed that while the effect was statistically significant, the contribution of emotional valence to search efficiency was relatively small. The findings suggest that emotional valence is available to the visual system before focal attention is allocated and can guide attentional deployment. The significance of this work lies in its methodological rigor in isolating emotional meaning from physical stimulus properties. By using conditioned meanings on identical faces, the authors provide strong evidence that visual search is not "blind" to emotion and that preattentive processes can utilize emotional valence to prioritize attention. This supports the hypothesis that the visual system is sensitive to threat-related information early in processing. However, the small effect size indicates that emotional valence is one of several factors influencing search efficiency and may be overshadowed by other determinants. The study clarifies the debate in the field by demonstrating that while emotional guidance exists, its impact on search performance is modest.

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• visual search