Psychological,endocrine, and neural correlates of attentional bias in subclinical depression

Background: Our knowledge with respect to psychological, endocrine, and neural correlates of attentional bias in individuals with high vulnerability to developing depression – the subclinically depressed, still remains limited. Design: The study used a 2?×?2 mixed design. Methods: Attentional bias toward happy and sad faces in healthy (N?=?26) and subclinically depressed individuals (N?=?22) was assessed via a neuroimaging dot-probe attention task. Participants also completed trait and state psychological measures and provided saliva samples for cortisol analysis. Results: The subclinical group showed attentional bias toward happy faces; past use of problem-focused coping strategies when dealing with a personally relevant stressor as well as state levels of anxiety, together, contributed to this bias. In the control group, the happy attentional bias was positively correlated with activity in the right caudate. In the subclinical group, the bias was negatively associated with the left fusiform gyrus and positively with the left inferior parietal lobule and bilateral putamen. We observed group differences in association between cortisol levels during the task and neural activity during happy attentional bias processing within the key regions involved in attention. Conclusions: The attentional bias toward happy faces may reflect an active coping attempt by the subclinical participants.     

Flying under pressure: Effects of anxiety on attention and gaze behavior in aviation

Landing an aircraft is a complex task that requires effective attentional control in order to be successful. The present study examined how anxiety may influence gaze behavior during the performance of simulated landings. Participants undertook simulated landings in low visibility conditions which required the use of cockpit instruments in order to obtain guidance information. Landings were performed in either anxiety or control conditions, with anxiety being manipulated using a combination of ego-threatening instructions and monetary incentives. Results showed an increase in percentage dwell time toward the outside world in the anxiety conditions. Visual scanning entropy, which is the predictability of visual scanning behavior, showed an increase in the randomness of scanning behavior when anxious. Furthermore, change in scanning randomness from the pre-test to anxiety conditions positively correlated with both the change in cognitive anxiety and change in performance error. These results support the viewpoint that anxiety can negatively affect attentional control.     

Prospective duration judgments: The role of temporality and executive demands of concurrent tasks

It is known that concurrent non-temporal tasks shorten reproduced temporal durations in prospective duration judgments. Two experiments were carried out, one comparing a concurrent temporal task to a minimally demanding concurrent task (Experiment 1) and one comparing an executive concurrent (Simon) task with a less demanding non-executive concurrent task (Experiment 2). An effect of the concurrent task type on temporal reproductions was found. Furthermore, a duration length effect was found, where longer durations were underestimated more than shorter durations. This effect tended to be stronger for the experiments that included a concurrent task that demanded high attention.     

Cognitive factors associated with depression and anxiety in adolescents: A two-year longitudinal study

Background/Objective: To examine the roles of anxiety sensitivity and attentional bias in the development of anxiety and depression symptoms among adolescents. Method: 214 grade 7 to grade 10 Hong Kong Chinese students completed a package of psychometric inventories to measure levels of anxiety sensitivity, selective attentional processing, and anxiety and depressive symptoms in 2016 and then again in 2017. Results: Girls, when compared with boys, exhibited more anxiety symptoms and anxiety sensitivity in 2016. They also reported a significant increase in mean depression level from 2016 to 2017. Regression analyses revealed that the physical-concerns dimension of anxiety sensitivity, positive attentional bias, and to a lesser extent negative attentional bias were related to the development of both anxiety and depression symptoms one year later. Fear of mental incapacity could predict depression one year later but not anxiety symptoms. Conclusions: Intervention through anxiety sensitivity training to reduce somatic concerns and attentional bias modification to increase habitual attention to positive stimuli and to disengage from negative stimuli can reduce anxiety and depression symptoms among high school students.     

Assessment of driver’s attentional resource allocation to visual,cognitive, and action processing by brain and eye signals

Driving a vehicle is comprised of multiple tasks (e.g., monitoring the environment around the vehicle, planning the trajectory, and controlling the vehicle), and requires the allocation of capacity-limited attentional resources to visual, cognitive, and action processing; otherwise, the quality of task performance will deteriorate, increasing the risk of near-accidents or crashes. The present study proposes that variations in the total amount as well as the individual amounts of attentional resources allocated to visual, cognitive, and action processing depending on the driving situations could be objectively estimated by the combined use of three physiological measures: (1) the duration of eye blinks during driving, (2) the size of eye-fixation-related potentials (EFRPs), i.e., event-related potentials (ERPs) that are time-locked to the offset of saccadic eye-movements during driving, and (3) the size of auditory-evoked potentials (AEPs), i.e., ERPs time-locked to the onset of task-unrelated auditory stimuli discretely presented during driving. We implemented these measures when participants (N = 16) drove a vehicle on a slalom course under four driving conditions defined by a combination of two levels of speed requirement (fast and slow) and two levels of path width (narrow and wide). The findings suggested that, (1) when driving at fast compared to slow speeds, the total amount of resources allocated to overall processing increased, which consisted of an increase in the amount of resources allocated to cognitive (and possibly action) processing and a decrease in the amount of resources allocated to visual processing, and (2) when driving on narrow compared to wide paths, the total amount of resources allocated to overall processing remained almost the same (due to complementary speed reduction), which consisted of an increase in the amount of resources allocated to visual processing, a decrease in the amount of resources allocated to cognitive processing, and almost the same amount of resources allocated to action processing. The driver’s resource management strategies indicated by these results as well as the utility and limitations of the proposed method are discussed.     

P300 as an index of attention to self-relevant stimuli

Past work suggests that information related to the self receives ‘preferential access’ to the limited pool of attentional resources. However, these studies have been limited by their reliance on response-time measures, which require overt responding and represent the combined effects of multiple stages of information processing. One aim of the present study was to extend past work by obtaining a response-independent index of attention allocation sensitive to changes in discrete stages of information processing. An additional goal was to explore the potential time course of differential sensitivity to self-relevant cues. We assessed the P300, an ERP component that provides an index of attentional resources, evoked by autobiographical self-relevant stimuli (e.g., one’s own name). As expected, P300 was augmented for self-relevant stimuli relative to control stimuli. In addition, analyses of P300 latency indicate that the effects of self-relevance are present during higher-order stages of cognitive processing related to selective attention. These results complement and extend previous work on the role of self-relevance in the selection of material for further processing.     

Vigilance for threat: effects of anxiety and defensiveness

Eysenck’s (1997) theory that attentional biases for threat vary as an interactive function of trait anxiety and defensiveness was tested using a visual probe task. Two stimulus exposure conditions were used to explore a secondary issue concerning attentional allocation over time. Results indicated that, among high trait anxious participants, only those with low levels of defensiveness showed vigilance for threatening faces presented for 500 ms. They also showed an attentional preference for neutral faces, relative to happy faces, irrespective of exposure condition. This pattern was reversed in high trait anxious participants with high levels of defensiveness, who showed an attentional bias towards happy faces (relative to neutral faces) under both exposure conditions. The findings are discussed in relation to their implications for (a) the significance of measures of defensiveness for the conceptualization of high trait anxious individuals, and (b) the status of anxiety-related biases at different stages of information processing.     

On the saliency of negative stimuli: Evidence from attentional blink1

Abstract: When people are asked to detect two targets from a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream, impairment of recognition of the second target (T2) can be observed if the T2 is presented several hundred milliseconds later than the first target (T1). This phenomenon is known as attentional blink, and is considered to reflect some temporal characteristic of the attentional process. The aim of the present study was to use the attentional blink paradigm to examine whether the affective meaning of the stimuli could affect the magnitude of attentional blink. In Experiment 1, the valence of the T2 (neutral, positive, and negative) was manipulated. Significant T2 detection deficit was observed with neutral and positive T2 but not with negative T2. Experiment 2 demonstrated that non‐significant attentional blink in negative T2 in Experiment 1 could be attributed to the negative affective meaning of T2. Results are discussed in terms of the high saliency of negative information.     

And along came a spider: An attentional bias for the detection of spiders in young children and adults

Spiders are among the most common targets of fears and phobias in the world. In visual search tasks, adults detect their presence more rapidly than other kinds of stimuli. Reported here is an investigation of whether young children share this attentional bias for the detection of spiders. In a series of experiments, preschoolers and adults were asked to find the single spider picture among an array of eight mushrooms or cockroaches or the reverse. Both children and adults detected the presence of spiders more rapidly than both categories of distracter stimuli. Furthermore, there was no difference between the detection of two neutral stimuli (cockroaches vs. mushrooms). These results provide the first evidence of enhanced visual detection of spiders in young children.     

Mere presence of distractors: Another determining factor for the attentional blink1

Abstract: When two visual targets are presented in rapid succession, perception of the second target is deteriorated if the temporal lag between the two targets is short (0–300 ms). This ‘attentional blink’ (AB) phenomenon has been believed to occur only when the second target is followed by a backward mask or when there is a task switching between two targets. The present study revealed another determining factor for the occurrence of the AB, the presence or absence of a distractor stream. Five experiments examined the effect of possible confounding factors in the extant literature and suggested that the mere presence of a distractor stream affects the processing of targets even when the observers tried to ignore them, resulting in a processing delay. This effect is discussed in a model of AB deficit in terms of decay of the second target's representation.