Psychological studies have already proven a connection between emotional stimuli and visual attention. However, there is a lack of evidence of how much an individual’s mood influences visual information processing of emotionally neutral stimuli. In contrast to prior studies, we explored the effect of positive mood on bottom-up low-level visual saliency. In our extensive experimental studies, we induced positive or neutral emotions in 106 subjects using a psychological method of autobiographical memories and listening to positive music and then performed an eye-tracking study with three task types—free viewing, memorizing the image content and visual search tasks. We explored differences in the human gaze behaviour between both emotions and relate them to the bottom-up attention correlation between emotionally aroused and non-aroused subjects. We observed that positive emotions induce a strong broadening and engagement effect on the bottom-up attention while performing all task types. On the other hand, we found out that certain tasks are solved less efficiently when experiencing a positive mood. Therefore, we claim that positive mood may also act as a distractor while performing certain types of tasks.

中文翻译：

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个体情绪对显着性和视觉搜索的影响

心理学研究已经证明情绪刺激和视觉注意力之间存在联系。然而，缺乏证据表明个人的情绪在多大程度上影响了情绪中性刺激的视觉信息处理。与之前的研究相比，我们探索了积极情绪对自下而上的低级视觉显着性的影响。在我们广泛的实验研究中，我们使用自传记忆的心理学方法和听积极的音乐在 106 名受试者中诱发积极或中性的情绪，然后进行了三种任务类型的眼动追踪研究——自由观看、记忆图像内容和视觉搜索任务。我们探索了两种情绪之间人类凝视行为的差异，并将它们与情绪激发和非激发主体之间自下而上的注意相关性联系起来。我们观察到，在执行所有任务类型时，积极情绪会对自下而上的注意力产生强烈的扩大和参与效应。另一方面，我们发现在体验积极情绪时，某些任务的解决效率较低。因此，我们声称在执行某些类型的任务时，积极的情绪也可能会分散注意力。