Visual perception is heavily influenced by “top-down” factors, including goals, expectations, and prior knowledge about the environmental context. Recent research has demonstrated the beneficial role threat-related cues play in perceptual decision making; however, the psychological processes contributing to this differential effect remain unclear. Since visual imagery helps to create perceptual representations or “templates” based on prior knowledge (e.g., cues), the present study examines the role vividness of visual imagery plays in enhanced perceptual decision making following threatening cues. In a perceptual decision-making task, participants used threat-related and neutral cues to detect perceptually degraded fearful and neutral faces presented at predetermined perceptual thresholds. Participants’ vividness of imagery was measured by the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire-2 (VVIQ-2). Our results replicated prior work demonstrating that threat cues improve accuracy, perceptual sensitivity, and speed of perceptual decision making compared to neutral cues. Furthermore, better performance following threat and neutral cues was associated with higher VVIQ-2 scores. Importantly, more precise and rapid perceptual decision making following threatening cues was associated with greater VVIQ-2 scores, even after controlling for performance related to neutral cues. This association may be because greater imagery ability allows one to conjure more vivid threat-related templates, which facilitate subsequent perception. While the detection of threatening stimuli is well studied in the literature, our findings elucidate how threatening cues occurring prior to the stimulus aid in subsequent perception. Overall, these findings highlight the necessity of considering top-down threat-related factors in visual perceptual decision making.
The novel coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic is associated with elevated rates of anxiety and relatively lower compliance with public health guidelines in younger adults. To develop strategies for reducing anxiety and increasing adherence with health guidelines, it is important to understand the factors that contribute to anxiety and health compliance in the context of COVID-19. Earlier research has shown that greater perceived risk of negative events and their costs are associated with increased anxiety and compliance with health behaviors, but it is unclear what role they play in a novel pandemic surrounded by uncertainty. In the present study we measured (1) perceived risk as the self-reported probability of being infected and experiencing serious symptoms due to COVID-19 and (2) perceived cost as financial, real-world, physical, social, and emotional consequences of being infected with COVID-19. Worry was assessed using the Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PWSQ) and health compliance was measured as endorsement of the World Health Organization (WHO) health directives for COVID-19. Our results showed that greater perceived risk and costs of contracting the COVID-19 virus were associated with greater worry and while only costs were associated with greater compliance with health behaviors. Neither self-reported worry nor its interaction with cost estimates was associated with increased engagement in health behaviors. Our results provide important insight into decision making mechanisms involved in both increased anxiety and health compliance in COVID-19 and have implications for developing psychoeducational and psychotherapeutic strategies to target both domains.
Cognitive models have highlighted attentional and memory biases to negatively valenced emotional stimuli, and their association, in the development and maintenance of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, research has focused mainly on attentional biases towards distracting (not task-relevant) negative stimuli and the links of attentional biases with memory remain underexplored. We manipulated attention during encoding of trauma-irrelevant negative and neutral words and examined the differential relationship of their encoding and recall with PTSD symptoms. Responders to the World Trade Center disaster performed tasks in which they read negative and neural words (full attention, FA) and reported the color of another set of such words (divided-attention, DA). Subsequently, participants used word stems to aid retrieval of words shown in both tasks. PTSD symptoms were associated with slower performance for negative vs neutral words in FA but not DA tasks. Furthermore, greater PTSD symptoms severity was associated with more accurate recall of negative vs neutral words, irrespective of whether words were presented on FA or DA tasks. These findings suggest that PTSD symptoms in a trauma-exposed population are related to encoding of trauma-irrelevant negative information when attention is fully deployed and subsequent recall of negative information, irrespective of whether attention was fully deployed. ATTENTION AND MEMORY BIASES IN PTSD.• Attentional biases to negative stimuli and their relationship with memory biases in PTSD are understudied• Higher PTSD symptoms were related to slower encoding of negative vs neutral words viewed under full but not divided attention • Higher PTSD symptoms were associated with more accurate recall of negative vs neutral words, irrespective of whether words were viewed under full or divided attention• Attention voluntarily directed towards negative stimuli and their greater recall may be important treatment targets for PTSD.
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