The Impact of Emotional Distractors In Visual Search: Mechanisms Of Attentional Capture And Learning-Based Suppression

In an environment saturated with information, maintaining focus on goal-relevant input can be challenging. Even when our objectives clearly define what to attend to, irrelevant stimuli often intrude. The question of why this happens has multiple answers, but they can largely be covered by one concept: “salience.” Although individuals may successfully complete a task, the presence of salient but irrelevant information can lead to longer response times and increased error rates, which may, in turn, have significant negative consequences. While the impact of physically salient distractors has been shown repeatedly, the influence of emotionally salient distractors, especially those with negative valence, remains relatively understudied. Therefore, we investigated whether emotionally salient, task-irrelevant stimuli disrupt attention in a manner similar to physically salient ones and hypothesized that their distracting power would be more resistant to suppression despite learning-dependent control mechanisms. By integrating behavioral and eye-tracking measures, our study highlights the dynamic interplay between emotion, salience, and learning in guiding attentional selection, providing new insights into how attentional control deals with complex, emotionally salient stimuli. As a first step, we conducted a standardization study in which participants rated peripherally presented pictures in terms of valence, arousal, complexity and recognizability. This ensured that peripheral presentation did not significantly alter perceptual evaluations of emotional pictures and allowed us to match neutral and negative pictures for complexity, while distinguishing them for valence and arousal. In the second experiment, we assessed the impact of salient distractors during a classic visual search task. Participants were asked to identify the target defined with a distinct outline shape and indicate whether a white dot appeared above or below it. Search displays included either simple geometric shapes (i.e., squares) or pictures, with a salient distractor present in 60% of trials. Finally, the third experiment examined whether increasing the spatial predictability of distractor appearance across locations would reduce their impact. Our results confirmed that the presence of both simple geometric and picture distractors reduced accuracy and increased reaction times relative to distractor-absent trials, replicating classic attentional capture effects observed in visual search paradigms. This finding confirms that salient stimuli, regardless of their nature, compete for attentional resources and disrupt goal-directed behavior. Furthermore, emotionally negative distractors exerted even a stronger and more persistent effect, highlighting the difficulty of ignoring emotionally charged stimuli, even with repeated exposure or predictable spatial presentation.