Foraging through emotions: emotional stimuli and participants’ trait anxiety shape visual foraging

Previous work suggests that target selection during visual foraging is achieved through competition between different factors (e.g. proximity, priming, value) that orient attention towards one of the possible targets. However, this research has mainly involved simple stimuli such as coloured dots. Here, we investigated whether target selection is sensitive to the emotional content of the stimuli during visual foraging, using real-world photographs eliciting negative, neutral or positive emotions. Moreover, based on results from single-target visual search, we examined how participants' trait anxiety influences foraging behaviour. Seventy-five observers completed three foraging tasks corresponding to three emotional-valence conditions (positive, neutral, negative). The task was to select all the targets (pre-specified emotional images) as fast as possible while ignoring neutral distractors. Observers' foraging strategy (i.e. selection order, number of switches between target types) and performance (i.e. selection times, number of distractor selections) were measured. We also assessed participants' trait anxiety. The results revealed that negative emotional stimuli significantly influenced both foraging strategy and performance. Furthermore, the effect of negative emotion on foraging performance was amplified for participants with high trait anxiety. These findings suggest that emotional characteristics of both targets and participants contribute to target selection during visual foraging.