Can irrelevant emotional distractor faces induce blindness? The role of distractor saliency and task relevance

Abstract

Prior research employing emotional faces as distractors within the emotion-induced blindness paradigm has yielded mixed findings, prompting the present investigation into the impact of distinct types of emotional faces on target perception in this framework. Experiment 1 utilized happy faces, neutral faces, baseline stimuli, and inverted emotional faces as distractors, while Experiment 2 employed angry faces, neutral faces, and inverted emotional faces. Results demonstrated that neither happy faces (Experiment 1) nor angry faces (Experiment 2) significantly impaired target perception. By contrast, inverted emotional faces induced a statistically significant reduction in accuracy of target orientation judgments. These findings demonstrate that emotional distractor faces do not automatically elicit blindness under certain conditions, highlighting the importance of both the saliency and task relevance of the distractor in the occurrence of blindness. This study challenges the hypothesis of automatic attentional capture by emotional faces, comprehensively discusses probable reasons underlying these counterintuitive patterns, such as arousal, physical salience, task relevance, and emphasizes the boundary conditions of emotional distractor faces induce blindness.