Fear, but not fear-relevance, modulates reaction times in visual search with animal distractors

The research aimed at examining attentional selectivity in a visual search paradigm using pictures of animals that have provided a recurrent threat in an evolutionary perspective (i.e., snakes and spiders) and pictures of animals that have supposedly posed no such threat (i.e., cats and fish). Experiment 1 showed no advantage of fear-relevant stimuli over non-fear-relevant animal stimuli. However, an attentional capture seemed to emerge as a delay in the disengagement of attention, specifically when there was a massive presentation of fear-relevant stimuli in the array. The results from Experiment 2, where participants were selected based specifically on their fear of either snakes or spiders (but not both), showed a preferential processing of the congruent feared stimulus, when compared with non-fearful participants, which strengthens the notion that fear significance may be an important factor drawing attention to a particular spatial location.