Psychopathic traits and attentional control: Antisociality associated with poorer real-world cognitive functioning and egocentricity associated with poorer low-prevalence visual search performance due to quitting early

Abstract

Attentional control is the process that enables focusing on executing goals without succumbing to distraction, and it is implicated in meaningful outcomes such as driving safety, perspective-taking, and emotion regulation. Across three studies we investigated the relationship between psychopathic traits (egocentricity, callousness, and antisocial tendencies) and: a) subjective experiences of attentional control in real-world contexts, b) performance on a task that differentiates proactive from reactive attentional control, and c) performance on a real-world relevant task that demands endogenous maintenance of a goal with minimal scaffolding from the task (low prevalence visual search). A strong and consistent finding was that antisocial tendencies were associated with poorer subjective real-world attentional control. Psychopathic traits were not reliability associated with individual differences in either proactive or reactive attentional control. Egocentricity was associated with poorer performance in low prevalence visual search, but this was mediated by a reduced quitting threshold (i.e., giving up on searching for the target earlier). This likely reflects reduced motivation rather than impaired ability. Altogether, there was no evidence for psychopathic traits being associated with enhanced attentional control. The differential relationships between different psychopathic traits and attentional control highlights the importance of distinguishing them.