Indexing automatic attentional capture by negative information in anxiety using the talking heads attentional bias assessment task.

The role of attentional biases to threat and attentional bias alignment in distinct measures of emotional resilience.

Cognitive model suggests that social anxiety disorder (SAD) is maintained by persistent biases in attention, interpretation, and memory. Neuroscientific perspectives further implicate that hyperactivation of amygdala and default mode network, alongside prefrontal cortex dysregulation may underlie the neural mechanisms of SAD. This study is the first to investigate the effects of offline high-definition transcranial direct current stimulation (HD-tDCS) on multiple cognitive biases in young adults with social anxiety. Seventy-four university students with elevated social anxiety were randomly assigned to either an active stimulation group (n = 37) or a sham control group (n = 37). Each participant completed ten 20-minute interventions over five consecutive days, with anodal stimulation targeting left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). Three behavioural tasks were used to assess attention, interpretation, and memory bias pre- and post-intervention. Additionally, participants completed self-report measures of cognitive biases and social anxiety symptoms before and after intervention, as well as at a 1-month follow-up. Mixed-model MANOVA results showed that offline HD-tDCS over the left DLPFC significantly improved attention avoidance, negative interpretation bias, and negative memory bias (F (3,43)= 3.97, η2 = 0.22, p = 0.014). However, linear mixed-effects model showed no significant differences between two groups in self-reported symptoms. These findings suggest that HD-tDCS targeting left DLPFC can lead to improvements in behavioural indicators of cognitive biases, with effects persisting at least in the short term after stimulation. However, the benefits may not extend to self-reported conscious experiences. Overall, the results provide promising evidence for the potential of HD-tDCS targeting DLPFC in modulating cognitive biases among young adults with social anxiety symptoms.

What is the relation between major depressive disorder and amygdala reactivity?

Reliable and non-invasive assessment of affective states is crucial in animal welfare research. Linking affective states to cognitive processes, such as cognitive biases, provides a promising approach. An affect-driven attention bias - the tendency to focus more on threatening than on neutral or positive stimuli when in a negative affective state - has been observed in humans and non-human animal species. However, implementation is often hampered because ecologically relevant test setups need to be adapted to species-specific differences in the perception and processing of information from different modalities. As an initial step towards developing and validating an affect-driven attention bias test for goats, we aimed to identify visual stimuli perceived as potentially threatening using a looking-time paradigm. In a within-subject design, 30 adult female dwarf goats ( Capra hircus ) were presented with photographs of 12 animal species (six natural predators and six non-predators) from three taxa (mammals, reptiles, birds). Each image was shown for 10 seconds on one of two video screens, while the opposite screen remained white. Each goat completed four sessions (one per day) of six trials each: two sessions showing full-body and two sessions showing face/head-only images, resulting in 24 trials per subject. Analysis of relative looking duration revealed a significant interaction between animal taxon and predator category. Goats looked longer at predatory than non-predatory reptiles, while the opposite pattern was found for mammals. No difference was observed for birds. The presented body part (full body vs. face/head only) did not influence looking behaviour. These results suggest that photographs of predatory reptiles, particularly snakes, might be perceived as potentially threatening by goats, indicating their suitability as negative stimuli in future affect-driven attention bias tests. Further validation is needed to confirm their negative valence. • Attention bias tests need validated stimuli in terms of their perceived valence. • We aimed to identify ecologically relevant visual stimuli perceived as potentially threatening by dwarf goats, using a looking-time paradigm. • We presented subjects with photographs of predatory and non-predatory species from three different taxa. • Goats paid more attention to predatory reptiles compared to non-predatory ones. • Further validation is needed to confirm their negative valence.

Health anxiety is feeling anxious about health and illnesses. Certain symptoms and biases, such as memory bias, attention bias, and preoccupation, have been identified within the cognitive-behavioral model and explored in numerous studies. To our knowledge, no systematic review has specifically examined the cognitive vulnerability factors and how they contribute to the onset and persistence of health anxiety, rather than the cognitive symptoms once health anxiety was developed. Therefore, the current study aimed to systematically review cognitive vulnerability factors of health anxiety. A literature search was conducted across Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed, yielding 2823 records, of which 24 studies met the inclusion criteria (e.g. full-text, English-written, quantitative studies) after screening. Results showed that anxiety sensitivity and intolerance of uncertainty were the most reported cognitive variables associated with health anxiety. These transdiagnostic factors were considered as alternative targets of therapy because this approach was reported to be effective.

Visuospatial attention has been extensively studied using a wide variety of markers in the brain and in behavior. We can broadly classify these markers into two distinct groups: reactive measures, where the presence and strength of attentional biases are inferred from the reaction to a probe stimulus, and proactive measures, which track attentional biases without (or before) the presentation of a probe stimulus. A difference in either type of measure (between two experimental conditions) is typically interpreted to reflect a difference in attentional resources. However, it is not a given that these various reactive and proactive measures of attention all read out the same construct; they may very well tap into independent processes. Here, we measure some of these proactive and reactive signatures of attending a location (changes in cortical excitability as measured by rapid invisible frequency tagging, alpha lateralization, gaze bias, probe-evoked ERPs, and behavioral reports) in an EEG-eye-tracking task (n = 23). Though all these metrics indeed correlate with our attentional manipulation, we show that they are not direct correlates of each other and that, of all the proactive measures, only the gaze bias predicts subsequent behavioral responses. This demonstrates that existing markers of attention cannot be used interchangeably and likely capture independent subprocesses of attention.

Continued drug use is thought to affect neural networks involved in attention and reward processing, with increased attentional bias being granted to drug-related versus non-drug-related cues. However, cannabis literature on this topic remains scarce, particularly longitudinal research using ERPs. This Stage II Preregistered Research Report investigated disruptions associated with cannabis (ab)use in ERP components and explored their role as potential biomarkers of future use. One hundred forty-two young adults (55 current users, 35 abstinent users, 52 nonusers, aged 18-38 years) completed a cannabis cue-reactivity task and the monetary incentive delay (MID) task during electroencephalographic data collection. We analyzed the P3, late positive potential (LPP), and reward positivity. Participants completed a 3-month follow-up on cannabis use. Compared with nonusers, current cannabis users (but not abstinent users) showed higher P3 amplitudes (when subtracting neutral cues to cannabis cues) in the cannabis cue-reactivity task. Exploratory analyses revealed that higher P3 amplitudes were associated with greater monthly cannabis use and predicted reductions in use after 3 months. In the MID task, current users showed a trend for blunted early and full-window LPP amplitudes across all monetary cues. Exploratory analysis suggested that increased LPP amplitudes to monetary loss cues and feedback, as well as blunted early LPP to non-gain feedback, may predict greater reductions in cannabis use 3 months later. As for abstinent cannabis users, they showed enhanced LPP amplitudes to cannabis versus neutral cues relative to nonusers; however, no significant group differences emerged in the MID task. These results provide exploratory evidence for a hyperactive attentional system to cannabis-related cues and a hypoactive system to other rewarding stimuli in current cannabis users; still, these effects were not uniform across ERP components or groups. In addition, this hyperactive system, revealed in components such as P3, also appears to predict reductions (vs. increases) in cannabis use over time, highlighting the complex interactions between neural activity and behavior. We discuss the findings in light of the attentional bias toward cannabis cues in current users while acknowledging alternative hypotheses that warrant examination in future research.

Reward learning and attention in risky alcohol use: Absence of Pavlovian influences but altered response bias in high-risk drinkers.

ABSTRACT Pseudoneglect, a subtle attentional bias toward the left visual field in neurologically healthy individuals, can be measured with a split-screen method in which a bright stimulus in one hemifield elicits stronger pupil constriction when it appears on the left than on the right (Strauch, C., Romein, C., Naber, M., Van der Stigchel, S., & Ten Brink, A. F. (2022). The orienting response drives pseudoneglect—Evidence from an objective pupillometric method. Cortex, 151, 259–271. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2022.03.006). Replications of this method have reported mixed results, including a large Registered Report that replicated the effect with a small effect size (d = −0.31). Given strong left-field biases in the emotional chimeric face test, the present study (n = 53) combined this task with split-screen pupillometry to test whether emotional face processing amplifies pupillary pseudoneglect. Pupillary pseudoneglect was observed during control trials with non-faces (d = −0.36) and was stronger for emotional faces (d = −0.76), but this difference was not significant. A strong left-field bias was confirmed for emotional face judgements (d = −0.76), which did not correlate with pupillary bias (ρ = −0.26), and for a line bisection test (d = −0.47), which also did not correlate with pupillary pseudoneglect (ρ = −0.19). These data support the split-screen pupillometric method for measuring pseudoneglect and replicate a previously-noted pattern that leftward biases across tasks show little statistical relation to one another.

Attentional bias to death-related stimuli: Modeling cortical dynamics underlying suicide risk.

How adverse childhood experiences shape adolescent major depressive disorder? Mediation by reduced maintenance bias to happy facial expression: Evidence from eye-tracking.

Alcohol use disorder and emotional processing patterns: Insights from a systematic review.

Everyday tasks typically require us to flexibly change our goals, prioritize relevant objects, and select appropriate motor responses. The task-switching, visual-search, and action-control literatures that study these abilities have all documented striking sequential effects (i.e., a strong impact on behavior when various aspects of a task repeat from one trial to the next) and suggested different mechanisms to explain them. However, crosstalk between these literatures has typically been restricted to pairs, with little attempt to integrate all three. Therefore, how these effects interact in complex tasks remains largely unknown. We addressed this question in four experiments. Participants searched for a target among distractors. A precue indicated the task for the upcoming trial (i.e., which object to search for). The task, target location, and motor response either repeated or changed randomly. We found that when participants were highly incentivized to prepare for the upcoming task, the location of the target from previous trials (n-1 and n-2) influenced performance only when the task repeated from these trials. By contrast, location-response binding effects were largely unaffected by task preparation or by trials earlier than the previous one. These findings are consistent with two different episodic-retrieval mechanisms. A proactive and task-dependent episodic-retrieval mechanism accounts for the attentional bias toward previous target locations documented in the visual-search literature. An episodic-retrieval mechanism that is largely task-independent and operates later accounts for the binding-and-retrieval effects documented in the action-control literature. Our findings also provide novel evidence for task preparation and task inertia in task switching. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Protein-DNA binding-site prediction is essential for understanding gene regulation and protein function, but remains difficult because DNA recognition depends on both sequence context and three-dimensional structure. We developed RGTBind, a graph transformer that combines multi-scale radial basis function distance encoding with a learnable threshold-gating mechanism to model spatially informative residue interactions. On the independent Test_129 and Test_181 benchmarks, RGTBind achieved the best F1, AUC, and MCC among the compared methods, supporting the value of distance-aware attention with structure-guided neighbor selection for residue-level protein-DNA binding-site prediction. Each protein was represented as a residue-level graph derived from AlphaFold2-predicted structures. Residue features included AlphaFold2 single representations, DSSP-derived structural descriptors, PSI-BLAST position-specific scoring matrices (PSSM), and HHblits hidden Markov model (HMM) profiles. Pairwise C -C distances were encoded using a multi-scale radial basis function scheme and incorporated into a graph transformer through spatially biased multi-head self-attention and a learnable threshold gate. Sequence redundancy was reduced with CD-HIT. The model was trained with AdamW using five-fold cross-validation on Train_573 and evaluated on the Test_129 and Test_181 benchmark datasets.

This paper presents a general scheme for enhancing the convergence and performance of DETR (DEtection TRansformer). We investigate the slow convergence problem in transformers from a new perspective, suggesting that it arises from the self-attention that introduces no structural bias on the inputs. To address this issue, we explore incorporating position relation prior as attention bias to augment object detection, following the verification of its statistical significance using a proposed quantitative macroscopic correlation (MC) metric. Our approach introduces an encoder to construct position relation embeddings for progressive attention refinement, which further extends the traditional streaming pipeline of DETR into a contrastive relation pipeline to address the conflicts between non-duplicate predictions and positive supervision. During the progressive refinement process, pattern collapse in multi-layer relations is investigated and alleviated through explicit layer- wise encoding and gated relation modulation. The proposed approach, termed Relation-DETR+, establishes a streamlined relation-enhanced pipeline for dense prediction, capable of jointly addressing object detection, semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and panoptic segmentation tasks within a single framework. Extensive experiments on both generic and task-specific datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which surpasses both task-specialized and unified counterparts with superior performance. Under the same training schedules, our approach demonstrates superior learning efficiency compared to DINO in detection and Mask-DINO in segmentation, respectively. Moreover, the proposed relation encoder serves as a universal plug-and-play component, bringing clear improvements for theoretically any DETR- like methods. Furthermore, we introduce a large-scale class-agnostic detection dataset, SA-Det-100k. The experimental results on the dataset illustrate the potential of proposed explicit position relation towards universal object detection. Code for Relation-DETR/Relation-DETR+ is available at https://github.com/xiuqhou/Relation-DETR.

Attention bias (AB), the excessive attentional selection of certain stimuli over others, is found in individuals suffering from depression. Similarly, alpha asymmetries, the lateralization of inhibitory cortical activity in the EEG alpha band (8-13 Hz) have been linked to depression and motivational direction. By contrasting novel and more reliable AB metrics against alpha asymmetries in an exploratory data analysis, we aimed to examine whether hemispheric differences are associated with AB scores, which could in turn refine the current model of AB metrics. Fifty nonclinical females, aged 18-30 years with minimal-to-moderate depressive symptoms were included. The participants performed two sessions of the dot-probe task, measuring AB, consisting of 160 trials each. Primary and ratio AB scores were calculated by using the novel response-based calculations. Furthermore, resting-state 32-channel EEG was measured for 2.5 min. Alpha asymmetry scores were calculated for frontal (F3/F4, F7/F8) and parietal electrode pairs (P3/P4, P7/P8). Correlations and interactions were analyzed. The primary AB scores were positively associated with frontal asymmetries, whereas parietal asymmetries showed negative associations. The ratio AB scores also showed regional differences. Parietal asymmetries interacted significantly with frontal asymmetries and AB. There was a moderate positive correlation between the BDI-II scores and the bias ratio. Our results suggest that alpha asymmetries contribute to individual differences in attention bias, with frontoparietal asymmetry interactions playing a notable role. These findings highlight hemispheric asymmetries as important to consider in future models of attention bias. Nonetheless, the associations are preliminary and call for replication.

Research suggests that patients with anorexia nervosa (AN) focus on subjectively unattractive parts of their own and others' bodies. This attentional bias has been explained by increased anxiety, which is observed in patients with AN. The present study therefore examined whether attentional bias towards unattractive body parts is stronger in AN patients than in clinical and non-patient controls. After high and low anxiety induction, female adolescents with AN (n=27), depression without an eating disorder (n=18), and non-patient participants (n=14) viewed images of their own bodies and those of an underweight and an overweight individual while eye-tracking data were recorded. After viewing the images, participants rated body parts regarding attractiveness. Mixed ANOVAs revealed that all participants looked longer at unattractive parts of the overweight body and fixated earlier on attractive parts of the overweight and own body than on unattractive parts. Unattractive body parts were visited more frequently for the overweight and own bodies. Compared to the two control groups, AN patients fixated more on subjectively unattractive body parts and were more likely to focus on the overweight body. This preference for subjectively unattractive body parts in AN patients is linked to increased body dissatisfaction, with gaze patterns indicating anxiety-related hyperscanning of their own and the overweight body.

Addressing pain and anxiety after coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) is essential. This research evaluates the associations between the Active Cycle of Breathing Technique (ACBT) and pain levels, anxiety, and blood oxygen saturation in patients recovering from CABG surgery. Seventy-six patients undergoing CABG surgery were randomly assigned using permuted block randomization (19 blocks of 4 participants) to either the intervention group (n = 38) or the control group (n = 38). After exclusions (2 reoperations in control, 1 withdrawal in intervention), 73 patients completed the study (intervention: n = 37; control: n = 36). The intervention group received ACBT alongside standard respiratory care, consisting of four sessions (two sessions daily at 10:00 AM and 5:00 PM on postoperative days 2 and 3), with each session lasting 10min and including three phases: breathing control, thoracic expansion exercises, and coughing technique. The control group received standard respiratory care with incentive spirometry (10-20 deep breaths per session) over the same schedule. Outcome measures pain (Visual Analog Scale), anxiety (State-Trait Anxiety Inventory), and arterial oxygen saturation (pulse oximetry) were assessed before intervention and after each of the four sessions by a blinded research assistant. Data were analyzed using repeated measures ANOVA. Baseline pain levels differed significantly between groups (p = 0.005), with the intervention group reporting higher pain. After adjusting for baseline differences, the ACBT group demonstrated significantly lower pain scores after the second (p < 0.001), third (p = 0.007), and fourth (p < 0.001) sessions compared to the control group. Anxiety levels were significantly lower in the ACBT group after all four sessions (p = 0.005, p = 0.019, p = 0.010, p = 0.004, respectively). Arterial oxygen saturation was significantly higher in the ACBT group after all four sessions (p < 0.001). Repeated measures ANOVA revealed significant group effects for pain (p < 0.001), anxiety (p = 0.006), and oxygen saturation (p < 0.001). Time effects were significant for anxiety (p < 0.001) and oxygen saturation (p < 0.001), but not for pain (p = 0.491). The group × time interaction was significant only for oxygen saturation (p < 0.001). ACBT was associated with lower pain and anxiety and higher arterial oxygen saturation in patients after CABG surgery. These findings suggest that ACBT may warrant consideration for integration into postoperative respiratory care protocols, pending further research with stronger methodological controls. However, the absence of participant blinding and potential attention bias limit causal inference, and future studies with sham controls are needed.

ABSTRACTEnvironmental input is inherently uncertain at both global and local levels. Depending on the level of uncertainty, cognitive systems dynamically adapt by shifting attention between exploiting learned regularities and exploring less predictable alternatives. While these dynamics are well documented in adults, how local and global uncertainty jointly influences children's exploration‐exploitation strategies during statistical learning remains unclear. Combining eye‐tracking with a probabilistic cueing task, this study quantified local and global uncertainty on a trial‐by‐trial basis to examine their effects on children's attentional preferences for cues differing in predictive value. Overall, 158 children aged 4 to 13 years passively viewed cue‐target sequences in which target shapes were predicted by cues with high‐ and low‐transitional probabilities. Results showed that under high global uncertainty, high local uncertainty biased attention toward high‐predictive cues, indicating uncertainty‐exploitation, whereas low local uncertainty biased attention toward low‐predictive cues, suggesting certainty‐exploration. Conversely, under low global uncertainty, attentional strategies reversed, shifting toward certainty‐exploitation and uncertainty‐exploration. These patterns were amplified in older children but attenuated in younger ones. These findings support a developmental dynamic model of exploration‐exploitation in which children's attention strategies are jointly regulated by local and global uncertainty and undergo systematic change across childhood.SummaryHow local and global uncertainty jointly shapes the development of children's exploration‐exploitation behavior during statistical learning across different ages remains poorly understood.Using eye‐tracking in a probabilistic learning task, we showed that 4‐13‐year‐olds adapt their information sampling and choices in response to overarching and trial‐by‐trial uncertainty.Under high global uncertainty, children relied on local uncertainty for exploitation and exploration; under low global uncertainty, they favored certainty‐driven exploitation and uncertainty‐driven exploration.These uncertainty‐regulated strategies were amplified in older children but attenuated in younger children.