Measuring biases of visual attention : A comparison of four tasks

Funding This research was funded by the University of Iceland Research Fund (to A.S.B. and Á.K.). Publisher Copyright: © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. Attention biases to stimuli with emotional content may play a role in the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders....

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Behavioral Sciences
Main Authors: Sigurjónsdóttir, Ólafía, Bjornsson, Andri S., Wessmann, Inga D., Kristjánsson, Árni
Other Authors: Faculty of Psychology
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: 2020
Subjects:
Anxiety
Attentional bias
Attentional blink
Dot-probe task
Emotional stimuli
Visual attention
Ecology
Evolution
Behavior and Systematics
Development
Genetics
Psychology (all)
Behavioral Neuroscience
Iceland
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11815/3446
https://doi.org/10.3390/bs10010028
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Summary:Funding This research was funded by the University of Iceland Research Fund (to A.S.B. and Á.K.). Publisher Copyright: © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. Attention biases to stimuli with emotional content may play a role in the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders. The most commonly used tasks in measuring and treating such biases, the dot-probe and spatial cueing tasks, have yielded mixed results, however. We assessed the sensitivity of four visual attention tasks (dot-probe, spatial cueing, visual search with irrelevant distractor and attentional blink tasks) to differences in attentional processing between threatening and neutral faces in 33 outpatients with a primary diagnosis of social anxiety disorder (SAD) and 26 healthy controls. The dot-probe and cueing tasks revealed no differential processing of neutral and threatening faces between the SAD and control groups. The irrelevant distractor task showed some sensitivity to differential processing for the SAD group, but the attentional blink task was uniquely sensitive to such differences in both groups, and revealed processing differences between the SAD and control groups. The attentional blink task also revealed interesting temporal dynamics of attentional processing of emotional stimuli and may provide a uniquely nuanced picture of attentional response to emotional stimuli. Our results therefore suggest that the attentional blink task is more suitable for measuring preferential attending to emotional stimuli and treating dysfunctional attention patterns than the more commonly used dot-probe and cueing tasks. Peer reviewed

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