The role of goal relevance in attentional bias

Attentional biases are described as the automatic deployment of attention to certain events in the environment of the individual. It is often assumed that these biases only occur for stimuli that gained relevance during evolution and in particular for negative emotional events (e.g., threatening animals). This preference for negative stimuli is explained by the high relevance of negative stimuli for survival. The present dissertation investigated (1) whether attentional biases to emotional events are indeed driven by the negativity of these stimuli or by high arousal levels and (2) whether attentional biases are limited to evolutionary relevant events or whether they will also be found for stimuli relevant to the temporary and current goals of an individual. Study one of the present dissertation confirms that high arousal levels drive attentional biases to emotional events which allows also positive emotional events to grab attention (e.g., erotica). In the remaining chapters of the dissertation, it was investigated whether stimuli relevant to a person’s actual and temporary goal influence the automatic allo-cation of spatial attention. A range of experiments using modified spatial cueing and dot probe paradigms found that stimuli relevant to an actual goal evoke an attentional bias. This bias reflects the motivational strength of goal pursuit meaning that attention is biased towards stimuli relevant to a prioritized goal when presented together with stimuli relevant to a less important goal. Furthermore, the bias persists when goal-relevant events are presented together with threatening events. The final chapter suggests that goals play also a role in emo-tional attention as attention in aversive emotions is biased towards stimuli that allow alleviating this emotion. These results support and extend old and recent accounts in research on motivation and attention that propose a modulation of automatic attentional processes by the current goals of a person