Time Course Of Attentional Bias Research Articles

Time course of attentional bias and its relationship with PTSD symptoms in bereaved Chinese parents who have lost their only child

ABSTRACT Background: The death of a child is a highly traumatic event for parents and often leads to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Attentional bias has been demonstrated in the onset and maintenance of PTSD symptoms. Objective: This study aimed to investigate the time course of attentional bias among bereaved Chinese parents who have lost their only child (Shidu parents), and to examine its relationship with PTSD symptoms and symptom clusters. Methods: Shidu parents (n = 38; 50–72 years of age) completed a dot-probe task with negative (trauma-related), positive, and neutral images at four stimulus presentation times (250, 500, 750, and 1250 ms). PTSD symptoms were measured by the PTSD Checklist for DSM-5 (PCL-5). Results: We observed difficulty in disengaging from both negative and positive stimuli at 750 ms and attentional bias away from negative stimuli at 1250 ms. At 1250 ms, attentional avoidance of trauma-related stimuli was positively correlated with PCL-5 total and intrusion scores. Difficulty in disengaging from positive stimuli was negatively correlated with PCL-5 total and intrusion scores as well as negative alterations in cogniti and mood scores. Conclusions: These findings enhance our understanding of attentional bias and cognitive–affective processing in PTSD. This study provides evidence that attentional bias (difficulty in disengaging from positive stimuli and bias away from negative stimuli) are correlated with PTSD symptoms and certain symptom clusters.

Time course of attentional bias in social anxiety: Evidence from visuocortical dynamics

Threat-related attentional bias is thought to have a causal influence on the etiology of social anxiety. However, there is uncertainty on whether attention dwells on or diverts away from threats, and the measurements typically utilized to explore attentional bias cannot continuously quantify changes in attention. Here, we used steady-state visual evoked potentials (ssVEPs) as a continuous neurophysiological measure of visual attentional processing to examine the time course of attentional bias in social anxiety. Participants with high (n = 18) and low (n = 18) social anxiety passively viewed two faces flickering at 15 and 20 Hz frequency to evoke ssVEPs, and completed Attentional Control Scale. The results showed that angry faces, as compared to happy and neutral faces, elicited larger ssVEP amplitudes for the time window of 180–500 ms after facial stimuli onset only in the high socially anxious individuals, and the effect extended to the next two periods of 500–1000 ms and 1000–1500 ms. The ssVEP amplitudes differed most when individuals with high social anxiety viewed angry-neutral expression combinations. Additionally, attentional control was negatively correlated with social anxiety and threat-related attentional bias. The results suggested that individuals with social anxiety initially oriented attention toward the threat and subsequently exhibited difficulty in disengaging attention from it, possibly due to impaired attentional control.

Infants' neutral facial expressions elicit the strongest initial attentional bias in adults: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence.

Recent studies that used adult faces as the baseline have revealed that attentional bias toward infant faces is the strongest for neutral expressions than for happy and sad expressions. However, the time course of the strongest attentional bias toward infant neutral expressions is unclear. To clarify this time course, we combined a behavioral dot-probe task with electrophysiological event-related potentials (ERPs) to measure adults' responses to infant and adult faces with happy, neutral, and sad expressions derived from the same face. The results indicated that compared with the corresponding expressions in adult faces, attentional bias toward infant faces with various expressions resulted in different patterns during rapid and prolonged attention stages. In particular, first, neutral expressions in infant faces elicited greater behavioral attentional bias and P1 responses than happy and sad ones did. Second, sad expressions in infant faces elicited greater N170 responses than neutral and happy ones did; notably, sad expressions elicited greater N170 responses in the left hemisphere in women than in men. Third, late positive potential (LPP) responses were greater for infant faces than for adult faces under each expression condition. Thus, we propose a three-stage model of attentional allocation patterns that reveals the time course of attentional bias toward infant faces with various expressions. This model highlights the prominent role of neutral facial expressions in the attentional bias toward infant faces.

The time course of attentional biases in pain: a meta-analysis of eye-tracking studies.

Previous meta-analyses investigating attentional biases towards pain have used reaction time measures. Eye-tracking methods have been adopted to more directly and reliably assess biases, but this literature has not been synthesized in relation to pain. This meta-analysis aimed to investigate the nature and time course of attentional biases to pain-related stimuli in participants of all ages with and without chronic pain using eye-tracking studies and determine the role of task parameters and theoretically relevant moderators. After screening, 24 studies were included with a total sample of 1425 participants. Between-group analyses revealed no significant overall group differences for people with and without chronic pain on biases to pain-related stimuli. Results indicated significant attentional biases towards pain-related words or pictures across both groups on probability of first fixation (k = 21, g = 0.43, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.15-0.71, P = 0.002), how long participants looked at each picture in the first 500 ms (500-ms epoch dwell: k = 5, g = 0.69, 95% CI 0.034-1.35, P = 0.039), and how long participants looked at each picture overall (total dwell time: k = 25, g = 0.44, 95% CI 0.15-0.72, P = 0.003). Follow-up analyses revealed significant attentional biases on probability of first fixation, latency to first fixation and dwell time for facial stimuli, and number of fixations for sensory word stimuli. Moderator analyses revealed substantial influence of task parameters and some influence of threat status and study quality. Findings support biases in both vigilance and attentional maintenance for pain-related stimuli but suggest attentional biases towards pain are ubiquitous and not related to pain status.

Attentional bias towards negative stimuli in healthy individuals and the effects of trait anxiety

This study aimed to investigate the time course of attentional bias for negative information in healthy individuals and to assess the associated influence of trait anxiety. Thirty-eight healthy volunteers performed an emotional dot-probe task with pairs of negative and neutral scenes, presented for either 1 or 2 s and followed by a target placed at the previous location of either negative or neutral stimulus. Analyses included eye movements during the presentation of the scenes and response times associated with target localization. In a second step, analyses focused on the influence of trait anxiety. While there was no significant difference at the behavioral level, the eye-tracking data revealed that negative information held longer attention than neutral stimuli once fixated. This initial maintenance bias towards negative pictures then increased with increasing trait anxiety. However, at later processing stages, only individuals with the highest trait anxiety appeared to fixate longer on negative pictures than neutral pictures, individuals with low trait anxiety showing the opposite pattern. This study provides novel evidence that healthy individuals display an attentional maintenance bias towards negative stimuli, which is associated with trait anxiety.

Time course of attentional bias in social anxiety: The effects of spatial frequencies and individual threats.

Hypervigilance and attentional bias to threat faces with low-spatial-frequency (LSF) information have been found in individuals with social anxiety. The vigilance-avoidance hypothesis posits that socially anxious individuals exhibit initial vigilance and later avoidance to threatening cues. However, the temporal dynamics of these two processes in response to various LSF threats in social anxiety remain unclear. In the current study, we presented faces containing anger, disgust, and fear in high and low spatial frequencies and compared the neural correlates with sensory perception and attention in individuals with high versus low social anxiety (HSA/LSA, n=24). A visual search task was used to investigate the attentional effects of threats and spatial frequencies, and event-related potentials, particularly, the visual components of P1 and P250, were measured to index visual perceptual and attentional processes, respectively. We found that HSA individuals showed pronounced P1 and reduced P250 to LSF (vs. HSF) faces, regardless of emotion type, suggesting a general pattern of initial vigilance and later avoidance to LSF faces in social anxiety. Furthermore, while LSA individuals showed enhanced P250 to both fear and disgust (vs. neutral) faces, HSA individuals showed pronounced P250 to disgust faces alone. Our results, thus, elucidate the temporal profile of early vigilance and later avoidance in social anxiety, highlighting its broad implication for all faces and predominance in the low spatial frequency. Considering individual threats, our results demonstrate specific attentional avoidance of fear faces in social anxiety.

Time course of attentional bias to painful facial expressions and the moderating role of attentional control: an eye-tracking study.

This study investigated the time course of attention to pain and examined the moderating effect of attentional control in the relationship between pain catastrophizing and attentional bias in chronic pain patients. A total of 28 patients with chronic pain and 29 pain-free individuals observed pictures of pain, happy and neutral facial expressions while their gaze behaviour was recorded. Pain intensity and duration, anxiety, depression, stress, attentional control and pain catastrophizing were assessed by questionnaires. In all subjects, the pattern of attention for pain faces was characterized by initial vigilance, followed by avoidance. No significant difference was found between the two groups in terms of orientation towards the stimuli, the duration of first fixation, the average duration of fixation or number of fixations on the pain stimuli. Attentional control moderated the relationship between catastrophizing and overall dwell time for happy faces in pain patients, indicating that those with high attentional control and high catastrophizing focused more on happy faces, whereas the reverse was true for those with low attentional control. This study supported the vigilance-avoidance pattern of attention to painful facial expressions and a moderation effect of attentional control in the association between pain catastrophizing and attentional bias to happy faces among pain patients.

Neural and behavioral correlates of attentional bias to cannabis cues among adults with cannabis use disorders.

The current pilot study probed the time course of attentional bias to cannabis-related cues among individuals with cannabis use disorders (CUDs) compared with healthy controls. Forty participants (individuals with CUDs, n = 20, Mage = 26.2 and healthy controls, n = 20, Mage = 28) completed a modified visual attention task in which they made decisions about the orientation of a target line while ignoring temporally flanking lines and cannabis-related, positive-, negative-, and neutral-images as behavioral responses and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. To examine the time course of attentional bias, we analyzed ERP responses separately to targets and distractors from 125 ms to 620 ms after stimulus onset. Results showed that, compared with healthy controls, cannabis users demonstrated greater selective attention failure (i.e., had more difficulties ignoring distractor stimuli) when making decisions in the presence of cannabis cues. Likewise, cannabis smokers demonstrated relatively larger differences in accuracy (i.e., committed more errors in target decisions) between trials involving cannabis cues versus neutral cues. ERP data revealed that the N1 component (125-200 ms after stimulus onset) to flankers preceding cannabis cues peaked relatively earlier and was of larger amplitude in cannabis users, suggesting an early perceptual bias toward the cannabis cues. Findings suggest that individuals with CUDs have poorer selective attention, impaired inhibitory control, and early attentional biases toward cannabis uses compared with healthy nonusers. The augmented early perceptual response suggests an involuntary orienting of attention toward cannabis cues. Implications for future research and intervention development for individuals with CUD are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Time Course of Attentional Biases Toward Body Shapes in Women Who Are Overweight or Obese

Although attentional bias toward body-related stimuli has been implicated as a vulnerability factor for body image disturbances, the time course of attentional biases toward body shapes in women who are overweight or obese is not clear. Using a dot-probe task and a between-subjects design, we assessed attentional biases (including facilitated attention, delayed disengagement, and avoidance) toward fat and thin body images in women who were overweight or obese (body mass index, BMI ≥ 25 kg/m2; n = 25) and normal-weight controls (BMI < 25 kg/m2; n = 25). Three stimulus presentation times were used: 100 ms, 500 ms, and 2000 ms. Women who were overweight or obese reported a stronger relative preference for Thin over Neutral images. All participants showed attentional bias toward thin body images in the initial orientation (100 ms) and later avoidance (2000 ms) stage, whereas only the women who were overweight or obese showed a bias toward fat body-related images when displayed for 500 ms, indicating difficulty disengaging from fat body-related stimuli. Slower attentional disengagement from fat body stimuli might be a cognitive marker for body image disturbance in women who are overweight or obese.

Event-related potentials of attentional bias toward faces in the dot-probe task: A systematic review.

The dot-probe task is a common task to assess attentional bias toward different stimuli and how groups differ (e.g., attentional bias in anxiety disorders). However, measuring reaction time has been suggested to be unreliable. Neuroimaging methods such as fMRI were shown to be more reliable in assessing attentional bias, but fMRI has poor temporal resolution and therefore cannot assess timing of attention. ERPs have been used to examine the time course of attentional bias. Although ERP research may be more reliable than reaction time, there have been inconsistencies in the literature. This review systematically searched for articles that used the dot-probe task with facial expressions and measured neural correlates with ERP. We found that some of the inconsistencies might be the cause of methodological differences (e.g., timing of stimuli), differences in emotional expression, and/or sample differences (e.g., sex, age, etc.). Suggestions on how future research could address the issues presented in this review were discussed.

Bringing color to emotion: The influence of color on attentional bias to briefly presented emotional images.

Is color a critical feature in emotional content extraction and involuntary attentional orienting toward affective stimuli? Here we used briefly presented emotional distractors to investigate the extent to which color information can influence the time course of attentional bias in early visual cortex. While participants performed a demanding visual foreground task, complex unpleasant and neutral background images were displayed in color or grayscale format for a short period of 133 ms and were immediately masked. Such a short presentation poses a challenge for visual processing. In the visual detection task, participants attended to flickering squares that elicited the steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP), allowing us to analyze the temporal dynamics of the competition for processing resources in early visual cortex. Concurrently we measured the visual event-related potentials (ERPs) evoked by the unpleasant and neutral background scenes. The results showed (a) that the distraction effect was greater with color than with grayscale images and (b) that it lasted longer with colored unpleasant distractor images. Furthermore, classical and mass-univariate ERP analyses indicated that, when presented in color, emotional scenes elicited more pronounced early negativities (N1-EPN) relative to neutral scenes, than when the scenes were presented in grayscale. Consistent with neural data, unpleasant scenes were rated as being more emotionally negative and received slightly higher arousal values when they were shown in color than when they were presented in grayscale. Taken together, these findings provide evidence for the modulatory role of picture color on a cascade of coordinated perceptual processes: by facilitating the higher-level extraction of emotional content, color influences the duration of the attentional bias to briefly presented affective scenes in lower-tier visual areas.

Time course of attentional biases toward body shapes: The impact of body dissatisfaction

Using a dot-probe discrimination task and a between-subjects design, we examined the time course of attentional biases (facilitated attention, delayed disengagement, and avoidance) toward thin versus fat bodies and explored the influence of body dissatisfaction (BD) on attention allocation among a sample of 163 women from the general population. Three stimulus presentation times were used: 100ms, 500ms, and 1500ms. We also used neutral body-shape-related stimuli as neutral stimuli related to the concept of interest to overcome the limitations of previous studies. At 500ms, the results highlighted delayed disengagement from very thin and negatively assessed bodies among women with high BD. This mechanism, which leads to attentional focalization on bodies that are difficult to achieve, might be considered dysfunctional because it may maintain or reinforce BD. Results at 100ms and 1500ms, as well as results for fat bodies, were not conclusive.

Time course of attentional bias for health-related information in individuals with health anxiety.

This study examined whether particular coping strategies influence attentional bias in individuals with health anxiety. A total of 84 participants were divided into four groups on the basis of their health-anxiety level (high/low) and coping strategy (monitor/blunter). The participants were shown screens displaying health-related pictures paired with non-health-related pictures. As a result, the high health-anxiety group was more attentive to health stimuli than the low health-anxiety group, regardless of the coping strategy. When maintaining attention, the high health-anxiety blunter shifted attention away from health stimuli, whereas the high health-anxiety monitor shifted attention toward the stimuli. These results indicated differences in how individuals manage attention processing according to their coping strategy.

Brief time course of trait anxiety-related attentional bias to fear-conditioned stimuli: Evidence from the dual-RSVP task

Background and objectivesAttentional bias to threat is a much-studied feature of anxiety; it is typically assessed using response time (RT) tasks such as the dot probe. Findings regarding the time course of attentional bias have been inconsistent, possibly because RT tasks are sensitive to processes downstream of attention. MethodsAttentional bias was assessed using an accuracy-based task in which participants detected a single digit in two simultaneous rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) streams of letters. Before the target, two coloured shapes were presented simultaneously, one in each RSVP stream; one shape had previously been associated with threat through Pavlovian fear conditioning. Attentional bias was indicated wherever participants identified targets in the threat’s RSVP stream more accurately than targets in the other RSVP stream. ResultsIn 87 unselected undergraduates, trait anxiety only predicted attentional bias when the target was presented immediately following the shapes, i.e. 160 ms later; by 320 ms the bias had disappeared. This suggests attentional bias in anxiety can be extremely brief and transitory. LimitationsThis initial study utilised an analogue sample, and was unable to physiologically verify the efficacy of the conditioning. The next steps will be to verify these results in a sample of diagnosed anxious patients, and to use alternative threat stimuli. ConclusionsThe results of studies using response time to assess the time course of attentional bias may partially reflect later processes such as decision making and response preparation. This may limit the efficacy of therapies aiming to retrain attentional biases using response time tasks.

The time course of attentional bias to cues of threat and safety

ABSTRACTIt is well known that relative to neutral stimuli, attention is biased towards processing stimuli that convey threat. In a previous study in which a particular stimulus (e.g. a blue diamond) was associated with the delivery of an electrical shock, the presence of the fear-conditioned stimulus interfered with the execution of voluntary eye movements to other locations. Here, we show that this effect not only occurs early in time, but remains present long after the fear-conditioned stimulus was removed from the screen. In a subsequent experiment, we associated the presence of a particular stimulus with safety, that is, when this stimulus was present it was certain that no electrical shock would be delivered. The presence of the safety signalling stimulus also interfered with the execution of voluntary saccades, but only when the time between stimulus and cue presentation was relatively long. The results indicate that both signals of threat and signals of safety interfere with execution of a saccade long after the source of threat or safety has been removed. However, only threatening stimuli affect saccade execution early in time, suggesting that threatening stimuli drive selection exogenously.

Time course of attentional bias to drug cues in opioid dependence.

Prior research indicates attentional bias to drug cues in opioid dependence. As this bias may be a marker of vulnerability to relapse following treatment, it is useful to clarify its underlying processes. The present study examined whether the opioid-related bias operates in early attention processes such as initial orienting, or in maintained attention, or both. Evidence from prior research is limited and mixed. The time course of attentional bias for drug cues was assessed using a dot-probe task with pictorial drug cues presented at 3 stimulus exposure durations: 200, 500 and 1,500 ms. There were 2 groups: opioid-dependent (n = 19) and healthy controls (n = 20). Individuals in the opioid-dependent group were recruited from community drug and alcohol treatment services; 95% were taking methadone. Compared with the control group, the opioid-dependent group showed a significant attentional bias for opioid-related information presented at 200 ms (p = .006). There was a similar trend at 500 ms which was nonsignificant (p = .057), and no bias at 1,500 ms (p = .698). The findings indicate an attentional bias to drug cues in opioid dependence, which operates in initial orienting processes, but not maintained attention. Further research should examine whether modification of this bias by treatment reduces risk of relapse. (PsycINFO Database Record

Supplemental Material for Time Course of Attentional Bias to Drug Cues in Opioid Dependence

Supplemental Material for Time Course of Attentional Bias to Drug Cues in Opioid Dependence

Someone’s lurking in the dark: The role of state anxiety on attention deployment to threat-related stimuli

Anxious states can alter attention, impairing goal-directed processing in favor of bottom-up capture. However, it is still unclear whether anxiety-related biases already influence the earliest stage of information processing, especially for unattended threat-related stimuli.Here we tested, using EEG, if the amplitude of the first component of the Visual Evoked Potentials (C1) to simple visual stimuli (either neutral or threat-related) varied depending on anxiety level and task demands.Results showed that anxiety altered goal-directed processing, reducing P300 amplitude to target stimuli, while it increased the C1 to irrelevant stimuli, regardless of their emotional content. Moreover, enhanced load at fixation reduced the amplitude of this component to neutral stimuli, but this early filtering effect was abolished by state anxiety.These results shed light on the time-course of attentional biases in anxiety, confirming that this transient state can enhance bottom-up capture as early as in V1, at the expense of goal-directed processing.

Sex differences in event-related potentials and attentional biases to emotional facial stimuli.

Attentional processes play an important role in the processing of emotional information. Previous research reported attentional biases during stimulus processing in anxiety and depression. However, sex differences in the processing of emotional stimuli and higher prevalence rates of anxiety disorders among women, compared to men, suggest that attentional biases may also differ between the two sexes. The present study used a modified version of the dot probe task with happy, angry, and neutral facial stimuli to investigate the time course of attentional biases in healthy volunteers. Moreover, associations of attentional biases with alexithymia were examined on the behavioral and physiological level. Event-related potentials were measured while 21 participants (11 women) performed the task, utilizing also for the first time a difference wave approach in the analysis to highlight emotion-specific aspects. Women showed overall enhanced probe P1 amplitudes compared to men, in particular after rewarding facial stimuli. Using the difference wave approach, probe P1 amplitudes appeared specifically enhanced with regard to congruently presented happy facial stimuli among women, compared to men. Both methods yielded enhanced probe P1 amplitudes after presentation of the emotional stimulus in the left compared to the right visual hemifield. Probe P1 amplitudes correlated negatively with self-reported alexithymia, most of these correlations were only observable in women. Our results suggest that women orient their attention to a greater extent to facial stimuli than men and corroborate that alexithymia is a correlate of reduced emotional reactivity on a neuronal level. We recommend using a difference wave approach when addressing attentional processes of orientation and disengagement also in future studies.

Eyes on the bodies: An eye tracking study on deployment of visual attention among females with body dissatisfaction

Visual attentional bias has important functions during the appearance social comparisons. However, for the limitations of experimental paradigms or analysis methods in previous studies, the time course of attentional bias to thin and fat body images among women with body dissatisfaction (BD) has still been unclear. In using free reviewing task combined with eye movement tracking, and based on event-related analyses of the critical first eye movement events, as well as epoch-related analyses of gaze durations, the current study investigated different attentional bias components to body shape/part images during 15s presentation time among 34 high BD and 34 non-BD young women. In comparison to the controls, women with BD showed sustained maintenance biases on thin and fat body images during both early automatic and late strategic processing stages. This study highlights a clear need for research on the dynamics of attentional biases related to body image and eating disturbances.