Auditory emotional cues enhance visual perception

摘要

Recent studies show that emotional stimuli impair performance to subsequently presentedneutral stimuli. Here we show a cross-modal perceptual enhancement caused by emo-tional cues. Auditory cue words were followed by a visually presented neutral target word.Two-alternative forced-choice identification of the visual target was improved by emo-tional cues as compared to neutral cues. When the cue was presented visually we repli-cated the emotion-induced impairment found in other studies. Our results suggestemotional stimuli have a twofold effect on perception. They impair perception by reflex-ively attracting attention at the expense of competing stimuli. However, emotional stimulialso induce a nonspecific perceptual enhancement that carries over onto other stimuliwhen competition is reduced, for example, by presenting stimuli in different modalities.