Abstract
Recently, responses to looming visual stimuli have been shown to depend on the emotional content of the stimulus. A threatening stimulus is judged to arrive sooner compared to a neutral stimulus, possibly buying the organism time to prepare defensive actions. Here, we explored the underlying mechanism. We found that time-to-contact judgments of threatening pictures did not differ from those of highly arousing pleasant pictures (Experiment 1), suggesting that arousal, not fear, modulates the perception of looming. Specific fear modulated the effects of arousal (Experiment 2): Spider-fearful participants’ judgments showed a threat advantage effect, while non-fearful participants’ judgments were less affected by emotional content. In Experiment 3, arrival times were less overestimated when pictures induced arousal. However, this effect interacted with the valence of the stimulus: For unpleasant stimuli, arousal induced shorter time-to-contact judgments, whereas for pleasant stimuli, an inverted U-shaped relation was found. We propose a general content effect to explain the overestimation with neutral pictures: Pictorial content may draw visual attention to inner contours instead of to the outer edges of the picture. This could delay time-to-contact judgments according to the known size-arrival effect. Our results add to the growing literature examining affective influences on visual perception.
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Acknowledgments
This research was funded by the grant “Kontaktzeitschätzung im Kontext” (HE 2122/6-1), Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). The results of these experiments were presented as a poster at the 36th European Conference on Visual Perception (25–29 August 2013) in Bremen. We thank Bernhard Both, Oliver Daum, Lisa Kiltz, Malte Klüver, Benyne Palayoor Jos, Stephanie Preuß, Johannes Rau, Tobias Schneider, Kristiane Usitzka, Romy Weiland, and Lisa Zschutschke for data collection, Maurizio Sicorello for data collection and help with analyses and manuscript formatting, Agnes Münch for assistance in programming, and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive advice.
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Online Resource 1. Short description of the stimuli and their mean arousal and valence ratings (averages of men and women) used for the three experiments, retrieved from Lang et al. (2005). (PDF 8 kb)
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Brendel, E., Hecht, H., DeLucia, P.R. et al. Emotional effects on time-to-contact judgments: arousal, threat, and fear of spiders modulate the effect of pictorial content. Exp Brain Res 232, 2337–2347 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-014-3930-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-014-3930-0