PDF (PhD Thesis Susan Chipchase) - Nottingham eTheses ...

et al., 2008; Kensinger et al., 2007a; Rowe et al., 2007) we would predict that
eye movement measurements will reflect greater attention on negative than
neutral or positive objects, with less attention on backgrounds with negative
than neutral or positive objects.
Attention at the time of encoding has previously been examined using
divided attention tasks to assess the amount of attentional capacity required for
the emotional enhancement of memory (e.g. Kern et al., 2005; Talmi et al.,
2007) but these studies have not been able to assess the relative distribution of
attention to central and peripheral elements of stimuli, which the measurement
of eye movements will allow. Eye movements enable us to record several
different measurements: total gaze duration as a measure of the amount of time
people look at different components of a scene, number of fixations to indicate
the amount of eye movements people make when looking at different
components of a scene and average fixation duration as a more sensitive
measure of processing difficulty where longer durations are often found with
more complex stimuli. Research into reading has shown that words which are
rarely encountered have longer average fixation durations than words which
are commonly encountered (Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989), suggesting that
average fixation duration reflects processing difficulty.
The aim of this experiment is to examine whether the central/peripheral
trade-off found with negative, but not positive or neutral, scenes in Experiment
6 could be explained by attentional effects at encoding. We predict that for
negative objects people will tend to look for a greater amount of time at the
object than the background, but that any such bias will be reduced or absent for
neutral and positive stimuli. We predict that the same pattern of memory
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