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

Notebaert, Lies; Crombez, Geert; Damme, Stefaan Van; Houwer, Jan De; Theeuwes, Jan

doi:10.1016/j.brat.2010.07.013

Cited by 27 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…The present study shows that people who fear particular stimuli (in this case spiders) monitor locations that potentially contain the objects that they fear in a compulsory fashion even though processing these objects is completely irrelevant for the current task (see also Notebaert, Crombez, Van Damme, De Houwer, & Theeuwes, 2010).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 71%

The role of fear and expectancies in capture of covert attention by spiders.

Devue¹,

Belopolsky²,

Theeuwes³

2011

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Fear-related stimuli are often prioritized during visual selection but it remains unclear whether capture by salient objects is more likely to occur when individuals fear those objects. In this study, participants with high and low fear of spiders searched for a circle while on some trials a completely irrelevant fear-related (spider) or neutral distractor (butterfly/leaf) was presented simultaneously in the display. Our results show that when you fear spiders and you are not sure whether a spider is going to be present then any salient distractor (i.e., a butterfly) grabs your attention, suggesting that mere expectation of a spider triggered compulsory monitoring of all irrelevant stimuli. However, neutral stimuli did not grab attention when high spider fearful people knew that a spider could not be present during a block of trials, treating the neutral stimuli just as the low spider fearful people do. Our results show that people that fear spiders inspect potential spider-containing locations in a compulsory fashion even though directing attention to this location is completely irrelevant for the task. Reduction of capture can only be accomplished when people that fear spiders do not expect a spider to be present.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 71%

The role of fear and expectancies in capture of covert attention by spiders.

Devue¹,

Belopolsky²,

Theeuwes³

2011

Emotion

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“…Because an attention bias was found for phobic and non-phobic participants, the findings were interpreted as a preattentive prioritization of threat information due to biological preparedness. However, albeit the observation that detection of fear-relevant animals is prioritized, it has been shown that the degree of facilitation depends on the number of distracting items in the search array, thus contradicting the idea of preattentive processing of threatening stimuli (Batty et al, 2005; Notebaert et al, 2010, 2011). …”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Varying expectancies and attention bias in phobic and non-phobic individuals

Aue¹,

Guex²,

Chauvigné³

et al. 2013

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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Phobic individuals display an attention bias to phobia-related information and biased expectancies regarding the likelihood of being faced with such stimuli. Notably, although attention and expectancy biases are core features in phobia and anxiety disorders, these biases have mostly been investigated separately and their causal impact has not been examined. We hypothesized that these biases might be causally related. Spider phobic and low spider fearful control participants performed a visual search task in which they specified whether the deviant animal in a search array was a spider or a bird. Shorter reaction times (RTs) for spiders than for birds in this task reflect an attention bias toward spiders. Participants' expectancies regarding the likelihood of these animals being the deviant in the search array were manipulated by presenting verbal cues. Phobics were characterized by a pronounced and persistent attention bias toward spiders; controls displayed slower RTs for birds than for spiders only when spider cues had been presented. More important, we found RTs for spider detections to be virtually unaffected by the expectancy cues in both groups, whereas RTs for bird detections showed a clear influence of the cues. Our results speak to the possibility that evolution has formed attentional systems that are specific to the detection of phylogenetically salient stimuli such as threatening animals; these systems may not be as penetrable to variations in (experimentally induced) expectancies as those systems that are used for the detection of non-threatening stimuli. In sum, our findings highlight the relation between expectancies and attention engagement in general. However, expectancies may play a greater role in attention engagement in safe environments than in threatening environments.

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“…Previous studies have shown that attentional engagement is associated with short RTs in a valid condition compared with RTs in a neutral condition, whereas attentional disengagement is associated with long RTs in an invalid condition compared with RTs in a neutral condition [67], [68]. On the basis of these studies, we calculated attentional disengagement from memorized stimuli (i.e., RTs in invalid conditions – RTs in neutral conditions) and attentional engagement to memorized stimuli (i.e., RTs in neutral conditions – RTs in valid conditions).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impaired Attentional Disengagement from Stimuli Matching the Contents of Working Memory in Social Anxiety

Moriya

Sugiura

2012

PLoS ONE

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Although many cognitive models in anxiety propose that an impaired top-down control enhances the processing of task-irrelevant stimuli, few studies have paid attention to task-irrelevant stimuli under a cognitive load task. In the present study, we investigated the effects of the working memory load on attention to task-irrelevant stimuli in trait social anxiety. The results showed that as trait social anxiety increased, participants were unable to disengage from task-irrelevant stimuli identical to the memory cue under low and high working memory loads. Impaired attentional disengagement was positively correlated with trait social anxiety. This impaired attentional disengagement was related to trait social anxiety, but not state anxiety. Our findings suggest that socially anxious people have difficulty in disengaging attention from a task-irrelevant memory cue owing to an impaired top-down control under a working memory load.

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

Cited by 27 publications

References 34 publications

The role of fear and expectancies in capture of covert attention by spiders.

The role of fear and expectancies in capture of covert attention by spiders.

Varying expectancies and attention bias in phobic and non-phobic individuals

Impaired Attentional Disengagement from Stimuli Matching the Contents of Working Memory in Social Anxiety

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