SEX! TORTURE! BANANA!

Do some words grab your attention more than others because of their semantic content? If I want to get the attention of 12 screaming kids, would I be better off yelling "SEX!" or "EGGPLANT!"

This was the topic (kinda) of a study recently reviewed by the excellent Cognitive Daily blog: Huang, Y., Baddeley, A., & Young, A. (2008). Attentional capture by emotional stimuli is modulated by semantic processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 34 (2), 328-339 DOI: 10.1037/0096-1523.34.2.328.

The study used an interesting methodology: rapid serial visual presentation, or RSVP which involves showing participants a random stream of stimuli, flashing by one every tenth of a second. Wiz bang! That's a lot of flashing. Let Cognitive Daily explain:

Typically if you're asked to spot two items in an RSVP presentation, you'll miss the second one if it occurs between about 2/10 and 4/10 of a second after the first one, but not sooner or later. This phenomenon is called Attentional Blink -- a blind spot caused by the temporary distraction of seeing the first item... Their streams were simply random strings of letters and digits, with two words embedded in each stream. Then they asked students to look for words naming fruit as they flashed by. If a fruit word appeared, it was always the second word in a stream. The key was in the first word: half the time, this first word was a neutral word like bus, vest, bowl, tool, elbow, or tower, and half the time it was an emotional word like rape, grief, torture, failure or morgue. So a sequence might look like this:

• JW34KA
• QPLX12
• MC15KW
• 083FLB
• TORTURE
• S21L0C
• DJW09S
• BANANA
• 3LW8Z9
• XOWL01

And so on. The first word acts as a distractor: the students are looking for fruit words, but this is always a non-fruit word. The question is, are emotional words more distracting?

The results result of the experiments was ...