Stop what you are not doing! Emotional pictures interfere with the task not to respond

Previous research has shown that emotional stimuli interfere with ongoing activities One explanation is that these stimuli draw attention away from the primary task and thereby hamper the correct execution of the task Another explanation is that emotional stimuli cause a temporary freezing of all ongoing activity We used a go/no-go task to differentiate between these accounts According to the attention account, emotional distractors should impair performance on both go and no-go trials According to the freezing account, the presentation of emotional stimuli should be detrimental to performance on go trials, but beneficial for performance on no-go trials Our findings confirm the former prediction Pictures high in emotional arousal impaired performance on no-go trials

Existence of a lower bound for the distance between point masses of relative equilibria for generalised quasi-homogeneous nn-body problems and the curved nn-body problem

We prove that if for relative equilibrium solutions of a generalisation of quasi-homogeneous $n$-body problems the masses and rotation are given, then the minimum distance between the point masses of such a relative equilibrium has a universal lower bound that is not equal to zero. We furthermore prove that the set of such relative equilibria is compact and prove related results for $n$-body problems in spaces of constant Gaussian curvature

Attention to future actions: the influence of instructed S-R versus S-S mappings on attentional control

Even though there is ample evidence that planning future actions plays a role in attentional processing (e.g., Downing Visual Cognition 11:689-703, 2000; Soto et al., Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12:248-342, 2008), it is not clear to what extent planning in itself (rather than the prior experience of the planned actions) controls attention. We suggest that attention can be biased towards stimuli that are associated with instructions for tasks that will be performed in the future even if those tasks have not yet been experienced. We performed two experiments in which participants receive instructions in which some objects were associated with a response (i.e., instructed S-R objects; "Experiment 1") or a stimulus property (i.e., instructed S-S objects; "Experiment 2"), whereas control objects were not. However, before participants were required to perform the S-R task ("Experiment 1") or perform an S-S memory task ("Experiment 2"), they performed a visual probe task in which target objects and control objects served as irrelevant cues. Our results show that attention was biased towards the S-R objects (compared to control stimuli) but not to S-S objects. These findings suggest that future plans can bias attention toward specific stimuli, but only when these stimuli are associated with a specific action. We discuss these findings in light of research concerning automatic effects of instructions and theories that view attention as a selection-for-action mechanism