Emotional stimuli similarly disrupt attention in both visual fields

Abstract

People often need to filter relevant from irrelevant information. Irrelevant emotional distractors interrupt this process. But does the degree to which emotional distractors disrupt attention depend on which visual field they appear in? We thought it might for two reasons: (1) people pay slightly more attention to the left than the right visual field, and (2) some research suggests the right-hemisphere (which, in early visual processing, receives left visual field input) has areas specialised for processing emotion. Participants viewed a rapid image-stream in each visual field and reported the rotation of an embedded neutral target preceded by a negative or neutral distractor. We predicted t..