ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how attention guides stages of visual processing, with profound consequences for conscious perception, and how this influence is shaped by our expectations, our goals, and our emotional responses to our surroundings. The idea that the perception of the external world can be shaped by our internal motivations and emotions has held appeal through much of the history of psychological thought. The phenomena, inattentional blindness and also illustrated the impoverished nature of perception in the absence of attention. It would be misleading to suggest that people are always scanning their surroundings for particular, well-defined visual features. Most aspects of the environment reverberate with emotional meaning, understanding perception in the real world necessitates understanding how it is impacted by emotion. The apparent spatial localization of emotion-induced blindness is surprising because it is commonly found that emotional stimuli attract and hold spatial attention, thereby facilitating perception of subsequent targets appearing at their location.
