The Attentional Boost Effect in Young and Adult Euthymic Bipolar Patients and Healthy Controls.

Giulia Bechi Gabrielli,Gloria Angeletti,Pietro Spataro,Alessandro Santirocchi,Gabriele Sani,Marco Costanzi,Vincenzo Cestari,Fabrizio Doricchi,Clelia Rossi-Arnaud

doi:10.3390/jpm11030185

Abstract

In the Attentional Boost Effect (ABE), stimuli encoded with to-be-responded targets are later recognized more accurately than stimuli encoded with to-be-ignored distractors. While this effect is robust in young adults, evidence regarding healthy older adults and clinical populations is sparse. The present study investigated whether a significant ABE is present in bipolar patients (BP), who, even in the euthymic phase, suffer from attentional deficits, and whether the effect is modulated by age. Young and adult euthymic BP and healthy controls (HC) presented with a sequence of pictures paired with target or distractor squares were asked to pay attention to the pictures and press the spacebar when a target square appeared. After a 15-min interval, their memory of the pictures was tested in a recognition task. The performance in the detection task was lower in BP than in HC, in both age groups. More importantly, neither young nor adult BP exhibited a significant ABE; for HC, a robust ABE was only found in young participants. The results suggest that the increase in the attentional demands of the detection task in BP and in adult HC draws resources away from the encoding of target-associated stimuli, resulting in elimination of the ABE. Clinical implications are discussed.

Highlights

The performance in the detection task was analyzed via a 2 × 2 ANOVA, considering group and age
The results showed that bipolar patients and healthy controls were accurate in the detection of target squares (M(HC) = 93.4% vs. M(BP) = 89.7%, F(1,80) = 2.90, p = 0.09, and η2 = 0.04)
When we analysed the main effects of age, we found that young and adult participants were accurate in the detection task (M(Y) = 92.5%

Summary

Introduction

Participants were required to study the faces and simultaneously press the spacebar when the target squares appeared When their memory of the faces was later probed in a yes/no recognition task, the performance was significantly better for the faces which were presented with target squares than for those presented with distractor squares or no square at all; no difference in performance was found between the latter two. It is thought to be the result of a broad attentional enhancement linked to the detection of target squares [2,5] In their dual-task interaction model, Swallow and Jiang [4] proposed that, on the one hand, monitoring the squares interferes with image encoding, because it biases perceptual resources away from the background stimuli and places additional cognitive demands to generate an appropriate response [6]. On the other hand, detecting the target squares and performing the associated motor response triggers temporal selective attention [7]

Methods

Results

Conclusion