Erin Wallace¹, Zephyr Markley¹, Gabriel Conn¹, Katherine Moore¹; ¹Arcadia University

Emotional stimuli tend to capture attention and are prioritized for visual processing ahead of neutral stimuli. Marketing, social, and political campaigns may use this principle to capture users’ attention on social media platforms, which are highly visual. Laboratory studies show this phenomenon using the attentional blink (AB) task—an emotional first target (T1) will cause a greater impairment in identifying a subsequent target (T2) as compared to a neutral T1, and an emotionally salient T2 will be protective against an AB. Here, we examined whether emotional nature images protect against an attentional blink when presented as a T2 in an AB task, and whether these effects are related to one’s views on climate change and the environment. On each trial, participants were cued with a category (e.g. “trees”) and were asked to identify how many times (0, 1, or 2) this item appeared within a 12-item rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). Critical trials (50% of total) containing two targets included a neutral T1 and T2 with positive, neutral, or negative valence; images were rated on emotionality by a separate group of participants. We observed smaller ABs for positive and negative T2s than for neutral stimuli. This effect was not significantly modulated by a participant’s environmental views. These findings have implications for the use of emotionality in image-based propaganda and social movements.