Gone for Good: Lack of Priming Suggests Early Perceptual Interference in Emotion-Induced Blindness

Emotional stimuli are perceptually prioritized to such a degree that they can cause people to miss seeing subsequent targets that appear in front of their eyes. It is unclear whether this effect (known as emotion-induced blindness) reflects post-perceptual interference, in which case unseen targets might still impact later responses, as in the seemingly similar “attentional blink”. An alternative is that emotional distractors prevent target encoding, and so leave no residual trace of target information. In this study, we used a priming task to assess these alternative possibilities. Each emotion-induced blindness trial was immediately followed by a speeded arrow judgement task, in which the arrow’s orientation could be congruent or incongruent with the orientation of an emotion-induced blindness target. Analyses revealed strong evidence that seen targets primed the arrow judgment, but there was moderate to strong evidence that unseen targets elicited no priming whatsoever. These results lend support to claims that emotion-induced blindness reflects failure to perceptually encode target information, and so reflects a different mechanism from the phenomenally similar attentional blink.