Do spiders capture attention in a bottom-up fashion and does fear have an impact?

Fear-related stimuli (e.g. spiders) seem to be prioritized during visual selection when they are actively searched for. This is especially true if the observers fear them. It remains unclear whether such stimuli capture attention automatically when they are task-irrelevant. To answer that question, we used the additional singleton paradigm (Theeuwes, 1992) in which participants searched for a shape singleton (a circle among diamonds) while a fear-related stimulus (a spider) or a fear-unrelated stimulus (a butterfly) was also present in the display. To assess whether fear affects the extent of a possible bottom-up capture, we compared performance of participants that scored high or low on the Fear of Spiders Questionnaire (Szymanski & O'Donohue, 1995). Results showed that both types of task-irrelevant animals captured covert attention. Importantly, both types of animals produced larger interference in high-fear than in low-fear participants. This study suggests that fear as an individual characteristic influences bottom-up capture.