Appraisal theories of emotion sustain that stimuli containing high biological relevance preferentially capture our attention, regardless of their valence. In this work, we study the priming effect of both cute and threatening pictures on global/local visual processing. Seventy-eight males and 168 females in different menstrual cycle phases performed the global/local Navon letter task immediately after observing cute (infants and baby animals), threatening (animals in aggressive poses) or neutral pictures. Hierarchical stimuli were made up of global and local letters that could be either congruent (e.g. global H, local_H) or incongruent (e.g. global H, local_S). While we observed no interaction between affective primes and sex/menstrual cycle phase, each of these variables did have an independent effect on the global/local task. Thus, letter identification was significantly slower in the global task (only) after cute vs. neutral primes. Relevantly, the local-minus-global RT index revealed an attentional narrowing after both cute and threatening primes (vs. neutral primes) in incongruent trials. As for sex effects, a facilitation of global vs. local processing was observed in both sexes. However, women registered slower RTs than men, whereas women in the luteal phase showed faster RTs than those in follicular phase in the local task. This suggests that women, mainly those in their luteal menstrual phase, tend to rely on a more analytical style of processing while attending to hierarchical stimuli. Most importantly, stimuli containing high biological significance drive narrowing of the attentional focus in global/local visual processing, especially in conditions of higher attentional demand.

情绪评价理论认为，具有高度生物学相关性的刺激会优先吸引我们的注意力，而不管它们的效价如何。在这项工作中，我们研究了可爱和威胁图片对全局/局部视觉处理的启动效应。不同月经周期阶段的 78 名男性和 168 名女性在观察到可爱（婴儿和婴儿动物）、威胁（具有攻击性姿势的动物）或中性图片后立即执行全局/局部 Navon 字母任务。分层刺激由全局和局部字母组成，它们可以是一致的（例如全局 H、局部_H）或不一致（例如全局 H、局部_S）。虽然我们观察到情感启动和性/月经周期阶段之间没有相互作用，但这些变量中的每一个确实对全局/局部任务有独立的影响。因此，在可爱素数与中性素数之后，字母识别在全局任务中（仅）显着变慢。相关地，local-minus-global RT 指数揭示了在不一致的试验中，在可爱和威胁的素数（与中性素数）之后注意力变窄。至于性别影响，在两性中都观察到了全局与局部处理的促进作用。然而，在局部任务中，女性的 RT 比男性慢，而黄体期女性的 RT 比卵泡期女性快。这表明女性，主要是那些处于黄体月经期的女性，在关注等级刺激的同时，倾向于依赖更具分析性的处理方式。最重要的是，具有高生物学意义的刺激会缩小全局/局部视觉处理中的注意力焦点，尤其是在注意力需求较高的情况下。