BRIEF REPORT Time course of attentional bias for threat scenes: Testing the vigilance‐avoidance hypothesis

Attentional biases towards familiar and unfamiliar foods in children. The role of food neophobia

“…For example, there is now a body of literature demonstrating that individuals with eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia, or a proneness to obesity, show a bias toward food, body shape and weight stimuli (see Faunce, 2002 for a review; see also Castellanos et al, 2009). This is consistent with the idea that visual attentional biases are linked to motivational systems (Mogg, Bradley, Miles & Dixon, 2004). Indeed, phobias have been linked with patterns of 'vigilance' and 'avoidance' toward threat-related stimuli (see Cisler & Koster, 2010 for review), and in adult populations research has consistently found strong associations between biases toward threatening visual stimuli (i.e.…”

Looking out for danger: An attentional bias towards spatially predictable threatening stimuli

“…Although there are theoretical (Mogg et al, 2004;Öhman et al, 2001) and clinical (Ouimet et al, 2009) reasons to expect attentional capture by threat, our results did not show this effect. However, we did found that the CS+ 16 was prioritized when it was spatially predictable.…”

Attentional bias to angry faces using the dot-probe task? It depends when you look for it

“…However, by varying the time between the onset of the stimuli of interest and the appearance of the probe, one can assess the time-course of the deployment of attention over the stimulus pair. Studies using this approach have indicated different patterns of attentional allocation to valenced stimuli (emotional words and faces) at 500ms compared with longer latencies (Bradley, Mogg, Falla, & Hamilton, 1998;Mogg, Bradley, Miles, & Dixon, 2004). In these papers it is assumed that the probe's appearance at 500ms is a measure of the initial allocation of attention to the stimuli.…”