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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2012 Oct 1.
Published in final edited form as: Neuropsychologia. 2011 Aug 11;49(12):3314–3319. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.08.004

Figure 2.

Figure 2

The Emotional Blink of Attention Task: schematic (panel a) and performance (panel b). a) The Emotional Blink of Attention can occur if a target must be detected shortly (200 ms) after a distractor image. A rotated landscape is the target. Distractors can be neutral or emotionally salient (aversive or erotic*). b) Performance on trials when the target was presented 200 ms (lag 2) or 800 ms (lag 8) after a distractor. The y-axis displays the percentage of correctly identified targets after the respective distractors. Both categories of motivationally salient distractors (aversive and erotic images) are more distracting than neutral images and impair performance significantly. That is true for control participants as well as both patient groups with amygdala lesions. Error bars represent one standard error of the mean. (Analysis of erotic distractors performance. A post-hoc comparison of the experimental groups for erotic distractors at lag 2 (panel b) revealed no differences (F(2,44)=.752, p=.477)).

* In the actual experiment, the erotic pictures depicted real couples engaged in erotic scenes, not classical paintings as shown here for illustrational purposes only.