Does a Single Session of Training Modify Emotion-Induced Blindness?

Emotion-Induced Blindness (EIB) is a robust phenomenon in which people fail to see targets that appear in spatiotemporal proximity to task-irrelevant emotional distractors. Evidence suggests that it involves different mechanisms than tasks widely used to assess attentional biases and their modification. To assess the utility of EIB as an attentional bias modification task, we investigated its malleability in two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants trained to ignore negative distractors, ignore neutral distractors, or simply received equivalent exposure to negative distractors over 720 trials. Analyses revealed strong evidence against effects of training condition. Experiment 2 investigated whether training effects might emerge with EIB was tested at a longer distractor-target interval and added an additional, no-distractor comparison condition. Analyses of Experiment 2 provided some evidence that exposure to negative stimuli may reduce the impact of novel negative stimuli, which may hold implications for the wider attentional literature.