| Popis: |
Exposure to fear chemosignals (body odors collected during fear emotional states) increases receivers’ sensory acquisition (de Groot et al., 2012) and enhances their attentiveness (Rubin et al., 2012). In fact, Rubin and colleagues suggest that (2012, p.211) exposure to fear (stress)-related chemosignals “…may enhance sensory processing of subtle environmental features that might otherwise be overlooked, thereby increasing receptivity to more detailed information”. Consistent with this argument of enhanced attentiveness, a recent study from our lab suggested that the exposure to fear chemosignals (vs. rest sweat) speeds up participants’ detection of subtle changes that occurred in their visual periphery during a vigilance paradigm (Gomes & Semin, 2021). In the present study, we plan to extend this finding, by exploring the effects of exposure to fear chemosignals (vs. rest sweat) on receivers’ attention in a novel change blindness paradigm using a virtual reality environment. More specifically, participants will be asked to perform a distracting task while task-non-relevant stimuli are displayed in the background. We intend to examine whether exposure to fear chemosignals results an increased awareness the task-irrelevant stimuli. |
