On the automaticity of attentional orienting to threatening stimuli.

Abstract

Attention is biased toward stimuli that have been associated with aversive outcomes in the past. This bias has previously been interpreted as reflecting automatic orienting toward threat signals. However, in many prior studies, either the threatening stimulus provided valuable predictive information, signaling the possibility of an otherwise unavoidable punishment and thereby allowing participants to brace themselves, or the aversive event could be avoided with fast and accurate task performance. Under these conditions, monitoring for threat could be viewed as an adaptive strategy. In the present study, fixating a color stimulus immediately resulted in a shock on some trials, providing a direct incentive not to look at the stimulus. Nevertheless, this contingency resulted in participants fixating the shock-associated stimulus more frequently than a neutral distractor matched for physical salience. Our findings demonstrate that threatening stimuli are automatically attended even when attending such stimuli is actually responsible for triggering the aversive event, providing compelling evidence for automaticity.

Selection history in context: Evidence for the role of reinforcement learning in biasing attention

“…Our findings raise a broader question concerning the diversity of mechanisms by which learning history shapes attentional selection. For example, aversive conditioning is also known to bias attention to punishment-predictive stimuli (e.g., Anderson & Britton, 2019;Schmidt, Belopolsky & Theeuwes, 2015;Wang, Yu, & Zhou, 2013). It is unclear to what degree attentional biases driven by aversive conditioning are similar to and distinguishable from attentional biases driven by reward history and outcome-independent selection history.…”

Arousal-Biased Competition Explains Reduced Distraction by Reward Cues under Threat

“…Two runs of reward training were completed before each block of the test phase to mitigate possible extinction effects between the two blocks. Before entering the scanner, participants underwent a shock calibration procedure to achieve a level of shock that is "unpleasant, but not painful" (Anderson and Britton, 2019c;Kim and Anderson, 2019c) and were then disconnected from the shock device. Participants were reconnected to the shock device before beginning the test phase of the threat block and were immediately disconnected from the device after completion of the threat block.…”

“…Attention can be voluntarily directed to objects (Duncan and Humphreys, 1989;Corbetta and Shulman, 2002) and spatial locations (Posner, 1980;Abrams et al, 2010). In addition, attention can be biased to prioritize the processing of features that are aligned with task goals (Wolfe et al, 1989;Folk et al, 1992), but also involuntarily captured by physically salient stimuli (Theeuwes, 1992) as well as stimuli previously associated with valent outcomes including punishment (Schmidt et al, 2015;Nissens et al, 2017;Anderson and Britton, 2019c) and reward (Hickey et al, 2010;Anderson et al, 2011;Anderson, 2016).…”

Mapping Dynamic Interactions Among Cognitive Biases in Depression

“…The attention task subsequently presents only the neutral stimuli to examine whether the learned associations with emotional content capture attention. In healthy individuals, studies have shown that associative learning of stable relations between a neutral stimulus (e.g., a shape or color) and aversive events (Anderson & Britton, 2019; Koster, Crombez, van Damme, Verschuere, & De Houwer, 2004; Schmidt, Belopolsky, & Theeuwes, 2015) or reward (Chelazzi, Perlato, Santandrea, & Della Libera, 2013; Hickey & van Zoest, 2013) involuntarily guides attention selection toward matching stimuli. For example, one study showed that task-irrelevant stimuli that were previously associated with reward, involuntarily capture attention and disrupt visual search for a salient target (Anderson, Laurent, & Yantis, 2011).…”