Different mechanism of visual attention in anxious and non-anxious population

Abstract

Using a modified Posner’s cue-target paradigm, we investigated whether negative cues attract more attention than neutral cues in anxious people. Previous studies used commonly an unbalanced proportion of valid and invalid trials (75% vs. 25% respectively). But in the present study, an equivalent proportion of valid and invalids trials was used for measuring detection speed of cues without participant’s expectancy caused by the unbalanced proportion. Emotional words (Experiment 1) and facial expressions (Experiment 2) were used as cues for target locations. The result of Experiment 1 and 2 showed that threatening cues facilitated target detection in valid trials and interfered with it in invalid trials in anxious participants and a reverse response patterns were found in non-anxious participants. This indicates that threatening cues attract more attention to the cued location in anxious people and in contrast, non-anxious people avoid threatening stimuli. In Experiment 3, we investigated the difference of validity effect across anxiety levels. The results showed that anxious participants gave less attention to cued location when the cues were non-informative whereas non-anxious participants gave more attention to cued locations in the same condition. We discussed two kinds of cognitive bias caused by anxiety levels: attentional bias and proportion related bias.