The Study On Attentional Boost Effect Of Negative Stimuli

Attentional boost effect was firstly discoveried and put forward by Swallow and his co-workers, which refers to in the divided attention condition, subjects were asked to finish encoding task and detection task at the same time. And the subsequent tests showed that study images presented simultaneously with the targets was better than memory for study images that presented simultaneously with the distractors.Based on dual-task interaction model, Mulligan advanced early-phase-elevated-attention, which considered in the early stage of encoding, the attentional boost effect was caused by the process of target detection.According to the early-phase-elevated-attention account,all of the variables that capture attention in the encoding phase will moderate the attentional boost effect.But at present, there is less empirical research on this hypothesis.In order to verify early-phase-elevated-attention, this study is to explore the structural characteristics of attentional boost effect in the perspective of emotion.In Experiment 1, negative emotional words and neutral words were used to explore the effect of emotion on attentional boost effect with verbal materials.The results showed that in verbal materials, attentional boost effect was moderated obviously by emotion,more specifically speaking,the attintional boost effect with negative emotion words was less obvious than that with neutral words. In Experiment 2,negative emotion and neutral emotional pictures were used to measure the effect of emotional picture on attentional boost effect. The results showed that in the picture materials, attention boost effect was moderated by emotion, which showed that,attentional boost effect with negative emotion pictures was less obvious than that with neutral pictures.In Experiment 3, negative emotion words were used to explore the effect of the arousal of negative emotion words on attentional boost effect. The results showed that in the negative words,attention boost effect was moderated by arousal, which showed that the attentional boost effect was only found in the negative words with non-arousal,and the attentional boost effect was not found in the negative-arousing words.In Experiment 4, negative emotional pictures were used to measure the effects of the arousal level of negative picture on attentional boost effect. The results showed that in negative emotional pictures,attentional boost effect was also moderated by the degree of emotional arousal, showing that attentional boost effect existed only in the negative pictures without arousal, but was not found in the negative-arousing picturesIn conclusion, the results support the early-phase-elevated-attention account,and showing that the attentional boost effect triggered by the processing of target detection would arise early at encoding.