Research
What are the limits of the EAB?
Dissertation defended
OPAM 2022 talk | VSS 2023 poster
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While the EAB (or emotion-induced blindness) is a well-known effect that has been replicated many times, recent research questions the conditions that elicit an EAB, and the strength of the effect. My dissertation examines these EAB limits, focusing on two questions: 1) Is the stimulus-driven capture in the EAB actually driven by emotion, or rather by visual distinctiveness and then modulated by emotion? 2) Is the relative weakness of the EAB (compared to the AB) explained by suppression of stimulus-driven attentional control due to the perceptually demanding RSVP displays used in most EAB studies?
Do crisis-related stimuli increase the EAB?
Manuscript under review
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Research has shown that distractor images of combat can increase the emotional attentional blink in veterans with PTSD, but does this generalize to widespread crises in the general public? Using images of Hurricane Harvey and words related to the COVID-19 pandemic, this study showed that stimuli related to widespread traumatic events result in a smaller EAB than typical stimuli used to evoke the EAB in the general population.
Is the EAB as strong as previously thought?
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The EAB is thought to be a stimulus-driven AB. My study directly compared the two "blinks" and found that the goal-driven attentional control in the AB is much stronger than the stimulus-driven capture in the EAB. Moreover, my study used four paradigms that together suggested that emotional stimuli must be visually distinct in order to elicit an EAB.
Can emotional stimuli survive the AB?
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Emotional distractors can capture attention away from a single target in a RSVP stream (EAB). However, is this stimulus-driven capture strong enough to survive the two-target AB? My study placed an emotional stimulus between two targets in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream and showed that unless extremely visually salient, emotional distractors do not survive and modulate the AB.
What drives dual task costs in older adults?
This study is ongoing
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Why does a cognitive task interfere with a second cognitive task, while walking seems to be spared of this interference until later in life? This study aims to examine the capacity limits of human attention that drive dual task costs by comparing cognitive/cognitive to cognitive/motor dual tasking in older adults.