A Virtual Reality-Based Setting to Investigate How Environments and Emotionally-Laden Stimuli Interact and Compete for Accessing Consciousness

Despite the clinical relevance of the interaction between emotionally-laden stimuli and their context, little is known about it. We used virtual reality (VR) to create an experimental setting capable to measure subjective, behavioral and psychophysiological correlates of the conscious access – and subsequent recognition – of phobic (spiders), generically-fearful (scorpions) and neutral (ants) stimuli located in positive, neutral and negative versions of the same virtual scenario. Behavioral data showed significant effects of scenario’s salience on recognition times, among low-spider fearful participants only. In addition, error rates were significantly higher as stimulus’ pleasantness increased, resulting in the lowest number of errors for spiders and in the highest for ants (scorpions placing in the middle of this ranking, coherently with their fearful but non phobic effect) in both high- and low-spiderfearful groups. Finally, stimulus’ content was found to significantly interact with error’s rate and level of fear for spiders, suggesting that a higher self-reported fear for a stimulus increases the likelihood of detecting it. Concluding, these results showed that valence of stimuli was more impactful than that of scenario; however, scenario’s salience (but not valence) was still capable to affect recognition times and error’s rates, though among low-spiderfearful participants only.