Traczyk, J. 1 , Szczepanowski, R. 2 & Fan, Z. 3
1 Center for Research in Economic Behavior. Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities. Wroclaw Faculty, Poland.
2 The Chair of Cognitive Psychology and Individual Differences. Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities. Wroclaw Faculty, Poland.
3 Psychology School. Central China Normal University. Wuhan，China.
There is commonsense view that awareness of perceptual information requires not only strong representation of the contents of awareness, but also access to that information. Recent studies suggest that a function relating the perceptual activation strength to conscious access may contain thresholds contrary to the continuous quality of perceptual representation. The main goal of this study was to show that the threshold model was able to account for participants’ performance under attentional blink (AB) paradigm with emotional targets. An analysis of receiver operating characteristics (ROC) was used to distinguish between two models of perception by inspecting two different ROC’s shapes. The results showed that observer’s performance was better described by the linear ROC predicted by the threshold theory than by the ROC’s curvilinear ROC shape provided by the signal-detection theory. This pattern of conscious threshold access to emotional content was consistent among all lag conditions. Moreover, there was no differences in the ROCs between the all-T1-trials condition and the correct-T1-trials condition, providing evidence that emotional representation of stimuli leads to attenuation of the blink effect. Overall, the findings support the notion that conscious access to emotional content operates in the “all-or-none” manner as predicted by the threshold approach.