When Does a Fear Conditioned Stimulus Capture Attention?

A neutral stimulus paired repeatedly with an aversive event (e.g., shock) will elicit a fear response when it is presented in isolation after the association has been learned. This conditioned stimulus may also capture attention, or be difficult to ignore, when presented as a distractor in a visual search display. Indeed, Anderson & Britton (2020) reported that participants automatically looked at a shock-associated stimulus, even though it was counterproductive to their task. However, in that previous study, the shock-associated stimulus was also physically distinctive (e.g., red circle amongst gray circles), which may have contributed to reported capture effects. To address this limitation, we replicated the study by Anderson & Britton (2020) but used visual search displays in which all of the stimuli were physically distinctive. During an initial training phase, participants were presented with a display of 6 differently colored circles and were instructed to make a single eye movement to the location of a red or blue target. One of these colored targets (e.g., blue) was paired with shock 50% of the time; the other target was never paired with shock. After training, participants completed a test phase, in which the target was defined by shape (e.g., diamond amongst circles). Occasionally, one of the distractors in the display was red or blue, and one of these colors had previously been associated with shock during training. We expected that participants would learn the color-shock association during training and would continue to look at the conditioned stimulus during test, even when they were instructed to ignore it, and even when they could not explicitly report the learned association. Data analysis is currently underway, and preliminary outcomes will be presented. Findings from this study are expected to provide important insights into when, or under what circumstances, a conditioned stimulus will capture attention