Capture of attention to threatening stimuli without perceptual awareness.

ABSTRACT: Visual images that convey threatening information can automatically capture attention. One example is an object looming in the direction of the observer-presumably because such a stimulus signals an impending collision. A critical question for understanding the relationship between attention and conscious awareness is whether awareness is required for this type of prioritized attentional selection. Although it has been suggested that visual spatial attention can only be affected by consciously perceived events, we show that automatic allocation of attention can occur even without conscious awareness of impending threat. We used a visual search task to show that a looming stimulus on a collision path with an observer captures attention but a looming stimulus on a near-miss path does not. Cr

SUBMITTER: Lin JY 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2724068 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature