Emotional aftereffects in context-guided visual search: evidence from electrodermal activity and respiration

Visual search is facilitated when targets appear within repeated distractor layouts - a phenomenon referred to as contextual cueing (CC). Emotional (negative) background images enhance CC even when these images are later removed from the search displays. Such an enhancement of CC could arise for at least two reasons. First, emotional arousal may facilitate learning of repeated displays, though the learning representation would be independent of the emotional stimuli. Second, repeated search displays may become conditioned stimuli due to their consistent pairing with emotional events. Emotional modulation of CC may occur during retrieval, as repeated layouts reactivate emotional responses from the initial learning phase. To test these accounts, we recorded emotional arousal via electrodermal activity (EDA) and respiration in 25 participants performing a two-phase CC task with emotional and neutral IAPS images shown in Phase 1 and removed in Phase 2. We found enhanced contextual learning for emotion displays, while neutral displays showed no reliable CC effect. Critically, the physiological activations elicited by emotionally paired displays in Phase 1 continued in Phase 2. These results support a retrieval-based account of the emotional facilitation of contextual learning. Our findings reveal how emotional events impact visual search through associative learning of context-emotion relationships.