Investigating sustained attention in contextual threat using steady‐state VEPs evoked by flickering video stimuli

Abstract

Detecting threat in ever-changing environments is crucial for adaptive behavior in animals, including humans. Accordingly, when exploring novel or changing environments, behavioral dispositions are often characterized by heightened vigilance to threat cues, in order to facilitate rapid detection of potentially dangerous situations (Lang et al., 2000; Öhman et al., 2001;Richards et al., 2014). An exaggeration of these mechanisms is a core symptom of anxiety disorders and has been incorporated into the DSM-5, where it is referred to as hypervigilance (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). However, the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying hypervigilance during

Moving toward reality: Electrocortical reactivity to naturalistic multimodal emotional videos

“…A recent and relevant study by Stegmann & colleagues (2023) employed classical conditioning of shock with 32 s neutral videos that placed the viewer's perspective as walking through empty office hallways and used a flickering overlay (a black frame appeared in the video every 50 ms) to induce a ssVEP and thus track cortical engagement. Their data showed a decrease in ssVEP amplitude over occipital areas during CS+ acquisition, consistent with the effects of the current study, though our videos were inherently emotion‐evoking.…”