The Blink and the Body: Cardiac Awareness Modulates the Perception of Emotionally Salient Words in an Attentional Blink Paradigm

We evaluated the interaction of emotion, interoceptive awareness (IA), and attention using an attentional blink (AB) task. Healthy undergraduates completed a cardiac awareness task and, based on previously validated cut scores, were classified as high or average perceivers (n = 19 in each group; matched on age and gender). Participants completed an AB task with counterbalanced emotional and/or neutral lexical stimuli as the first target (T1) and/or the second target (T2). Both high and average perceivers exhibited retroactive interference in conditions where T2 immediately followed T1. However, only the average perceivers exhibited a significant blink effect: They reported T2 inaccurately in trials in which one intervening stimulus occurred between T1 and T2. High perceivers exhibited their best performance in trials where both targets were emotional; average perceivers exhibited their worst performance in these trials. These results contribute to a small but growing literature that suggests IA and exteroceptive attention are related systems.