When Danger Lurks in the Background: Attentional Capture by Animal Fear-Relevant Distractors Is Specific and Selectively Enhanced by Animal Fear Ottmar V. Lipp University of Queensland Allison M. Waters Griffith University Across 2 experiments, a new experimental procedure was used to investigate attentional capture by animal fear-relevant stimuli. In Experiment 1 (N = 34), unselected participants were slower to detect a neutral target animal in the presence of a spider than a cockroach distractor and in the presence of a snake than a large lizard distractor. This result confirms that phylogenetically fear-relevant animals capture attention specifically and to a larger extent than do non-fear-relevant animals. In Experiment 2 (N = 86), detection of a neutral target animal was slowed more in the presence of a feared fear-relevant distractor (e.g., a snake for snake-fearful participants) than in presence of a not-feared fear-relevant distractor (e.g., a spider for snake-fearful participants). These results indicate preferential attentional capture that is specific to phylogenetically fear-relevant stimuli and is selectively enhanced in individuals who fear these animals. Keywords: fear relevance, visual search, attentional capture, anxiety, preparedness Snakes and spiders have long held a special meaning for humans and nonhuman animals alike (O ¨ hman & Mineka, 2003). This is thought to reflect the fact that phylogenetically fear-relevant stim- uli are processed differently from non-fear-relevant stimuli, such as, for instance, pictures of flowers and mushrooms. This notion has been confirmed in a number of different paradigms. Condi- tioning studies have yielded evidence for preferential learning or retarded extinction after training with fear-relevant stimuli; studies involving degraded stimulus presentations have found responses to fear-relevant stimuli even if these were not perceived consciously; and studies of covariation bias have revealed that the perceived likelihood of aversive outcomes is enhanced after fear-relevant predictors (for a review, see O ¨ hman & Mineka, 2001). In addition, preferential processing of animal fear-relevant stimuli has been documented in visual search tasks (Lipp, 2006; O ¨ hman, Flykt, & Esteves, 2001). O ¨ hman, Flykt, and Esteves (2001) presented unselected partic- ipants with matrices of either four or nine pictures that either were drawn from one single category, for example, all mushrooms, or contained one deviant, for example, a snake among three flowers, and asked them to make same and different judgments. Partici- pants were faster to find a fear-relevant deviant among non-fear- relevant backgrounds than vice versa. Moreover, they were slower to find a non-fear-relevant deviant in the large matrix than in the small matrix, a difference that was absent for fear-relevant devi- ants. Participants who were fearful of either snakes or spiders, but not both, were faster to detect feared fear-relevant deviants than not-feared fear-relevant deviants. These results were interpreted as reflecting attentional capture by the fear-relevant deviant, which was enhanced in participants who were afraid of the particular deviant animal. This interpretation is somewhat tempered by the findings from trials that did not contain deviants. Here, participants were faster to detect the absence of a deviant among fear-relevant stimuli than among non-fear-relevant stimuli, although this result did not emerge consistently across all three experiments reported (for similar findings, see Lipp, Derakshan, Waters, & Logies, 2004). The interpretation of the findings by O ¨ hman, Flykt, and Esteves (2001) as reflecting attentional capture by fear relevance can be criticized from a number of perspectives. First, more recent studies using the search paradigm used by O ¨ hman, Flykt, and Esteves have found that the search advantage for snakes and spiders among flowers and mushrooms is not specific for fear-relevant animals, but also present for non-fear-relevant animals (Lipp et al., 2004; Tipples, Young, Quinlan, Broks, & Ellis, 2002). This may reflect a general search advantage for animals among pictures of flowers and mushrooms or the fact that performance in a search task is influenced by factors other than deviant fear relevance such as lower level perceptual features (Purcell, Stewart, & Skov, 1996) or background– deviant similarity (Duncan & Humphreys, 1989). Second, although attentional capture by fear relevance can ex- plain why a fear-relevant deviant is found relatively quickly among non-fear-relevant backgrounds, it is inconsistent with the observation that the absence of a deviant is detected faster for matrices consisting only of fear-relevant stimuli (Lipp et al., 2004; O ¨ hman, Flykt, & Esteves, 2001, Experiment 3). Lipp (2006) resolved this apparent contradiction by demonstrating that deviant Ottmar V. Lipp, School of Psychology, University of Queensland; Allison M. Waters, School of Psychology, Griffith University. Australian Research Council Grant DP0559868 supported this work. Thanks are due to Tom Wallis and Stuart Wrightson for assistance with the data collection and to Paul Jackson, who programmed the task. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Ottmar V. Lipp, School of Psychology, University of Queensland, McElwain Building, St. Lucia, Queensland 4072, Australia. E-mail: o.lipp@psy.uq.edu.au Emotion Copyright 2007 by the American Psychological Association 2007, Vol. 7, No. 1, 192–200 1528-3542/07/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/1528-3542.7.1.192 192