Inhibitory attentional control in anxiety: Manipulating cognitive load in an antisaccade task.

Julian Basanovic,Patrick J F Clarke,Nigel T M Chen,Colin Macleod,Philippe Jawinski,Lies Notebaert

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0205720

Abstract

Theorists have proposed that heightened anxiety vulnerability is characterised by reduced attentional control performance and have made the prediction in turn that elevating cognitive load will adversely impact attentional control performance for high anxious individuals to a greater degree than low anxious individuals. Critically however, existing attempts to test this prediction have been limited in their methodology and have presented inconsistent findings. Using a methodology capable of overcoming the limitations of previous research, the present study sought to investigate the effect of manipulating cognitive load on inhibitory attentional control performance of high anxious and low anxious individuals. High and low trait anxious participants completed an antisaccade task, requiring the execution of prosaccades towards, or antisaccades away from, emotionally toned stimuli while eye movements were recorded. Participants completed the antisaccade task under conditions that concurrently imposed a lesser cognitive load, or greater cognitive load. Analysis of participants’ saccade latencies revealed high trait anxious participants demonstrated generally poorer inhibitory attentional control performance as compared to low trait anxious participants. Furthermore, conditions imposing greater cognitive load, as compared to lesser cognitive load, resulted in enhanced inhibitory attentional control performance across participants generally. Crucially however, analyses did not reveal an effect of cognitive load condition on anxiety-linked differences in inhibitory attentional control performance, indicating that elevating cognitive load did not adversely impact attentional control performance for high anxious individuals to a greater degree than low anxious individuals. Hence, the present findings are inconsistent with predictions made by some theorists and are in contrast to the findings of earlier investigations. These findings further highlight the need for research into the relationship between anxiety, attentional control, and cognitive load.

Highlights

An essential function of effective attentional processing is the capacity to control the allocation of attention in the presence of task-irrelevant information
It was important to ensure that any anxiety-linked differences in performance on the antisaccade task was not confounded by anxiety-linked differences in performance in the concurrent cognitive load task
While saccade latencies represent the key measure of performance reflecting inhibitory attentional control during the antisaccade task, some investigators have reported anxiety-linked differences in the number of erroneous saccades performed during antisaccade tasks [12,33], and analyses examined the potential influence of emotional tone, cognitive load, and anxiety vulnerability on the number of erroneous saccades performed by participants during the antisaccade task

Summary

Introduction

An essential function of effective attentional processing is the capacity to control the allocation of attention in the presence of task-irrelevant information. Researchers have revealed that, in general, heightened anxiety vulnerability is associated with poorer attentional control, and a reduction in the capacity to control the attentional inhibition of task-irrelevant stimuli (see [2] for a review). Evidence of this effect has commonly been observed using an antisaccade task paradigm [3]. The difference in the latency to execute antisaccades relative to prosaccades, the ‘antisaccade cost’, has commonly been taken to reflect the ability of individuals to exert inhibitory attentional control, with larger costs indicating poorer capacity to exert control [4,5,6]

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