Neuroscience Letters 535 (2013) 78–83 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Neuroscience Letters j our nal ho me p ag e: www.elsevier.com/locate/neulet When a bang makes you run away: Spatial avoidance of threatening environmental sounds Julie Bertels a,b,∗ , Régine Kolinsky a,b , Déborah Coucke a , José Morais a a Center for Research in Cognition and Neurosciences, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium, Avenue F.D. Roosevelt, 50, C.P.191, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium b Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique – FNRS, Rue d’Egmont, 5, B-1000 Brussels, Belgium h i g h l i g h t s ◮ Attentional biases to emotional sounds were studied through the beep probe task. ◮ Left-presented negative and taboo nonverbal sounds elicited attentional avoidance. ◮ Left-presented taboo nonverbal sounds also initiated an IOR phenomenon. ◮ Taboo sounds elicited a freezing reaction, whatever their location. a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 16 October 2012 Received in revised form 21 December 2012 Accepted 30 December 2012 Keywords: Attentional biases Beep probe task Environmental sounds Inhibition of return (IOR) Avoidance a b s t r a c t Environmental sounds can be powerful alarm signals. Hence, attentional orienting towards their loca- tion might occur extremely rapidly. Here, we used the beep probe task to investigate attentional biases to negative, positive and taboo sounds. While both left-presented negative and taboo sounds elicited attentional avoidance, taboo but not negative sounds triggered Inhibition of Return. Moreover, taboo sounds slowed participants’ responses, whatever the sound and beep locations. Positive sounds had no effect. Interestingly, although spatial effects specific to taboo sounds were related to their disgusting nature, their non-spatial effects were linked to their shocking/surprising trait. This is the first evi- dence of emotional sounds’ influence on spatial attentional orienting and of the involved emotional dimensions. © 2013 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved. Consider an ordinary day and focus on its auditory qualities. Silence is rare: background noise is almost constant and, as Bradley and Lang [7] point out, you cannot “shut your ears” as you can close your eyes. Hopefully, you will not react to each sound you hear. Rather, only those relevant to your goals or personal concerns will attract your attention. However, despite concentrated on the paper you are writing, you will probably notice the screaming ambulance rushing down the street. Given their speed of transmission and rel- ative insensibility to intervening stimuli, environmental sounds are very powerful alarm signals [21]. Emotional sounds have been found to capture attentional resources [e.g., 16,27]. Nevertheless, no study specifically investi- gated whether these sounds influence spatial orienting of attention, namely to what extent attentional resources are oriented to their location. Yet, identification of an auditory object relevant for sur- vival or ecological adaptation might orient attention towards its ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +32 26502633; fax: +32 26502209. E-mail addresses: jbertels@ulb.ac.be (J. Bertels), rkolins@ulb.ac.be (R. Kolinsky), deborahcoucke@hotmail.com (D. Coucke), jmorais@ulb.ac.be (J. Morais). location, putting the listener in a better position to process sub- sequent information from the same source. Consistently, we [4,5] reported preferential attentional orienting to the location of neg- ative and taboo (i.e., shocking) spoken words. Also, cross-modal modulation of visual spatial attention by anger prosody has been reported [9]. It is thus established that the emotional content of auditory lin- guistic stimuli modulates spatial attentional orienting. The present study aimed at investigating whether this phenomenon also occurs for non-linguistic stimuli, namely emotional nonverbal environ- mental sounds. Since the conceptual processing of environmental sounds is comparable to that of words [24], similar attentional biases may occur for both types of stimuli. Yet there are differences in the processing of words and envi- ronmental sounds. First, contrary to the arbitrary relationship that the sound pattern of words has to real-world objects or events, for many environmental sounds the mapping with meaning results from the physical properties of the object or event in question [28], which may lead to stronger attentional biases towards the emo- tional content of sounds. Second, several studies reported partially dissociated brain regions in the higher-order processing of verbal 0304-3940/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neulet.2012.12.058