Emotion-induced blindness reflects competition at early and late processing stages: an ERP study.

Emotion-induced blindness (EIB) refers to impaired awareness of items appearing soon after an irrelevant, emotionally arousing stimulus. Superficially, EIB appears to be similar to the attentional blink (AB), a failure to report a target that closely follows another relevant target. Previous studies of AB using event-related potentials suggest that the AB results from interference with selection (N2 component) and consolidation (P3b component) of the second target into working memory.