William Secrest¹, Brad Stilwell¹, Brian Anderson¹; ¹Texas A&M University

Distracting stimuli can be suppressed based on their simple features, such as color or shape. For example, individuals can learn to suppress a salient distractor, such as a uniquely colored item, when searching for a specific shape. However, in the real world we often encounter distractors that are associated with more complex properties such as emotional valence. Individuals can form implicit associations between arbitrary stimuli and emotional valence, but it remains unclear whether these valence associations can modulate distractor suppression. To test this, participants associated colors with emotionally valent words and we tested whether these color-valence associations modulated distractor suppression when those same colors served as distractors. To establish color-valence associations, we adapted the Implicit Association Task in which participants classified centrally presented words as either “good” or “bad.” Critically, the words were presented in one of three colors: one associated with positive words, one with negative words, and one with both positive and negative words. To assess whether these color-valence associations modulated distractor suppression, participants performed a visual search for a target shape (i.e., a unique shape in Experiment 1 or a specific shape, such as a circle, in Experiment 2). A salient, uniquely colored singleton distractor was either present or absent and participants were instructed to ignore it. The color singleton distractor could be one of the three valence-associated colors. In the association phase, participants were faster to respond to words in the positive and negative color, in addition to being faster to make a positive judgment. However, suppression of these valence-associated colors was not modulated. These results suggest that if there is any effect on attentional priority via implicit associations with emotion, it is either small, short-lived, or difficult to observe.