The role of attentional anterior network on threat-related attentional biases in anxiety

Abstract

A Posner covert orienting task was developed to investigate the role of the anterior and posterior attentional networks described by Posner and Petersen (1990) (Posner, M. I., & Petersen, S. E. (1990). The attention system of the human brain. Annual Review of Neuroscience , 13 , 25–42.) in attentional biases toward threat-related stimuli observed in non-clinical trait-anxious subjects. This task was administered in two different conditions depending on the informative value of the cue. Subjects had to detect an asterisk target that appeared 100 or 500 ms after the cue. As expected, the anxiety group (measured by the Sensitivity to Punishment scale) was related to a greater tendency to focus on locations where aversive and non-informative cues had appeared. This effect was observed at the 100 ms, but not at the 500 ms SOA, and disappears when cues were informative of target location. We have proposed that non-informative threat-related stimuli would activate the anterior network in anxious but not in non-anxious subjects.