Consequences of visual selective attention for evaluations of affectively positive and negative stimuli
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In visual attention tasks, stimuli that must be ignored or otherwise inhibited for accurate performance subsequently receive more negative evaluations than novel stimuli or those seen as the targets of attention (e.g., Raymond, Fenske & Tavassoli, 2003). Such distractor devaluation effects have been taken as evidence that the application of attentional inhibition has negative affective consequences for visual stimuli (Fenske & Raymond, 2006). This view predicts that inhibited stimuli should be rated more negatively regardless of their a priori affective status. Here we test a competing hypothesis that attentional inhibition does not impact subsequent evaluations by eliciting a negative affective response, per se, but acts instead to affectively ‘neutralize’ a distracting stimulus. This alternate view posits an inhibition-related attenuation of emotional salience that should produce different effects depending on the valence of the ‘neutralized’ stimulus affect. By this view, attentional inhibition applied to affectively positive stimuli should depress subsequent ratings, whereas inhibition of affectively negative stimuli should enhance subsequent ratings. A pilot rating study was used to identify images of faces depicting people judged on average to be either trustworthy (affectively positive) or untrustworthy (affectively negative). Pairs of these affectively positive or negative faces were then presented to a new group of subjects in an attentional cuing task designed to associate attentional inhibition with one face from each pair. Trust judgments obtained in a subsequent evaluation phase revealed similar levels of devaluation for both sets of cued (inhibited) faces relative to the uncued (non-inhibited) faces. These results are inconsistent with an inhibitory ‘neutralization’ hypothesis, and are taken instead as evidence that attentional inhibition has negative affective consequences for visual stimuli, regardless of their prior affective status. Generating negative affect for previously distracting stimuli might serve to make it easier to avoid such items in future encounters.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".