Talk by András Zsidó (Pécs): "The effects of threatening stimuli on visual search performance"

The effects of threatening stimuli on visual search performance

GEMI, Room 1.110     6.00 - 8.00 pm

András Zsidó (University of Pécs, Hungary) 

A large body of research suggests that threatening stimuli with evolutionary history have an advantage in visual processing. However, recent evidence indicates that modern threatening stimuli can have the same effect. Nonetheless, the results are often mixed. I will argue that previous studies exploring the highlighted processing of threatening cues tended to neglect an important factor, namely the arousal level of the emotionally charged stimuli. Furthermore, the classical visual search task used in the aforementioned studies had been met with criticism. I will present some of our experiments and two new visual search tasks that could serve as appropriate tools for future research. With the help of these, we will try to entangle the confounding results to arrive at a plausible explanation regarding the basics of threat detection.