Spiders capture attention especially when you are afraid of them

Recent studies suggested that fear-related stimuli (such as spiders or snakes) are prioritized during visual selection. However, it remains unclear whether such stimuli capture attention in a bottom - up fashion when they are irrelevant for the search task. To investigate this issue we used the additional singleton paradigm (Theeuwes, 1992 Perception & Psychophysics 51(6) 599 - 606), in which participants had to search for a shape singleton (a circle among diamonds) while either a fear-related stimulus (a spider) or a fear-unrelated stimulus (a butterfly) was also present in the display. To determine whether the capture was modulated by the degree of actual fear evoked by the stimuli we compared performance of participants that scored high or low on the Fear of Spiders Questionnaire (Szymanski and O'Donohue, 1995 Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry 26 31 - 34). Results indicate that both task-irrelevant spiders and butterflies capture attention. More importantly, however, for high-fear participants the interference caused by spiders was larger than that caused by butterflies, signifying the role of fear as a factor in the capture of attention by fear-related objects.