The Impact Of Immediate Targets On Threat Information Bias

An organism's odds of survival can be increased by focusing the limited-capacity processing resources of the visual system on potential threats in the environment.According to evolutionary models of threat processing,such prioritized processing of potential threats is largely stimulus-driven and reliant on a fast,subcortical pathway that is unaffected by cognitive influences such as current task goals or intentions.While recent evidence has revealed that events relevant to an individual's temporary and current goals also attract attention automatically.Attentional biases are not only limited to threatening information,but also to temporary goals.Therefore,whether the temporary goals influence the attentional biases to threatening information when both types of information are present needs further study.Three experiments adopted to respectively exploring the influence of temporary goals on attentional biases to threatening information,the influence of temporary goals on different compositions of attentional biases to threatening information and the influence of temporary goals on attentional biases to threatening information when stimuli are presented subliminally.Experiment 1 explored the impact of temporary goals on attentional biases to threatening information when the threatening information is goal-relevant or goal-irrelevant.Experiment 2 explored the impact of temporary goals on attentional biases to threatening information when stimuli are presented subliminally.Experiment 3 the impact of temporary goals on different compositions of attentional biases to threatening information.The results show that,when the threatening information is goal-irrelevant,temporary goals weakened the attentional biases to threatening information,temporary goals capture attention more than threatening information.While when the threatening information is goal-relevant,both temporary goals and threatening information would capture attention.By contrast,the N2 pc revealed a significant initial shift of attention to threat even when the threatening information is goal-irrelevant.when stimuli are presented subliminally,threatening information cannot capture attention no matter it was goal-irrelevant or goal-relevant.The spatial cueing paradigm revealed that temporary goals can not only impact the attentional orienting to threat but also disengagement from threat.