1348 MARATOS, MOGG, BRADLEY comparisons further revealed that performance accuracy was significantly better on positive trials than on neutral trials at lag 2 (pB.05). Finally, further analyses were conducted to address a supplementary question of whether or not a performance decrement (corresponding to an AB) occurred on trials with threat (T2) targets. As can be seen in Figure 3, performance accuracy on threat trials appeared to be worse when the threat T2 occurred shortly after the neutral T1, compared with when it occurred later in the RSVP stream. To evaluate this, performance accuracy on threat trials at lag 2 (which is within the temporal domain of the AB) was compared with mean performance accuracy on threat trials averaged across lags 5, 6, 8 and 9 (lags not within the temporal domain of the AB). Results showed that performance accuracy on trials with threat T2 targets was significantly worse at lag 2 than at later lags, t(19) 2.38, pB.05. DISCUSSION The present study used a schematic face version of the RSVP paradigm, which employed emotional and neutral faces as target stimuli, in order to test a key prediction from cognitive and neural models of emotion concerning the prioritisation of processing of threat information. In support of this prediction, the results indicated that participants’ ability to identify target face stimuli in a RSVP stream of distractor stimuli was enhanced if the second target stimulus was a threat face, rather than a neutral face. This effect was only evident within the temporal domain of the AB, i.e., when the second target face was presented shortly after the first (neutral) target face stimulus. Specifically, on trials that had only one or two intervening items between T1 and T2 (which corresponded to T1 T2 SOAs of 257 and 386 ms, respectively), participants were significantly better at identifying targets when the second face was threatening rather than neutral in emotional content. These findings are compatible with theories of emotion which propose that there are specialised cognitive mechanisms which promote attentional processing of threat cues, such that these cues are prioritised over processing of other types of information (e.g., LeDoux, 1996; O¨ hman, 1996). The results are also largely consistent with previous RSVP studies of the AB, which have used word (or ideographic) stimuli to examine selective processing of emotional information. As noted in the introduction, these studies have similarly found that the AB is attenuated when the second target is negative (or high in emotional arousal), rather than neutral in emotional content (e.g., Anderson, 2005; Ogawa & Suzuki, 2004). The present findings additionally complement the recent work of Fox et al. (2005) and Milders et al. (2006), who found evidence of a reduced AB for photographic representations of fearful faces. The results reported here not only indicate