Attentional Modulation of Emotional Conflict Processing with Flanker Tasks

Emotion processing has been shown to acquire priority by biasing allocation of attentional resources. Aversive images or fearful expressions are processed quickly and automatically. Many existing findings suggested that processing of emotional information was pre-attentive, largely immune from attentional control. Other studies argued that attention gated the processing of emotion. To tackle this controversy, the current study examined whether and to what degrees attention modulated processing of emotion using a stimulus-response-compatibility (SRC) paradigm. We conducted two flanker experiments using color scale faces in neutral expressions or gray scale faces in emotional expressions. We found SRC effects for all three dimensions (color, gender, and emotion) and SRC effects were larger when the conflicts were task relevant than when they were task irrelevant, suggesting that conflict processing of emotion was modulated by attention, similar to those of color and face identity (gender). However, task modulation on color SRC effect was significantly greater than that on gender or emotion SRC effect, indicating that processing of salient information was modulated by attention to a lesser degree than processing of non-emotional stimuli. We proposed that emotion processing can be influenced by attentional control, but at the same time salience of emotional information may bias toward bottom-up processing, rendering less top-down modulation than that on non-emotional stimuli.     

Impaired Attentional Disengagement from Stimuli Matching the Contents of Working Memory in Social Anxiety

Although many cognitive models in anxiety propose that an impaired top-down control enhances the processing of task-irrelevant stimuli, few studies have paid attention to task-irrelevant stimuli under a cognitive load task. In the present study, we investigated the effects of the working memory load on attention to task-irrelevant stimuli in trait social anxiety. The results showed that as trait social anxiety increased, participants were unable to disengage from task-irrelevant stimuli identical to the memory cue under low and high working memory loads. Impaired attentional disengagement was positively correlated with trait social anxiety. This impaired attentional disengagement was related to trait social anxiety, but not state anxiety. Our findings suggest that socially anxious people have difficulty in disengaging attention from a task-irrelevant memory cue owing to an impaired top-down control under a working memory load.     

Attentional bias to food images associated with elevated weight and future weight gain: an fMRI study

Behavioral studies reveal that obese vs. lean individuals show attentional bias to food stimuli. Yet research has not investigated this relation using objective brain imaging or tested whether attentional bias to food stimuli predicts future weight gain, which are important aims given the prominence of food cues in the environment. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine attentional bias in 35 adolescent girls ranging from lean to obese using an attention network task involving food and neutral stimuli. BMI correlated positively with speed of behavioral response to both appetizing food stimuli and unappetizing food stimuli, but not to neutral stimuli. BMI correlated positively with activation in brain regions related to attention and food reward, including the anterior insula/frontal operculum, lateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC), and superior parietal lobe, during initial orientation to food cues. BMI also correlated with greater activation in the anterior insula/frontal operculum during reallocation of attention to appetizing food images and with weaker activation in the medial OFC and ventral pallidum during reallocation of attention to unappetizing food images. Greater lateral OFC activation during initial orientation to appetizing food cues predicted future increases in BMI. Results indicate that overweight is related to greater attentional bias to food cues and that youth who show elevated reward circuitry responsivity during food cue exposure are at increased risk for weight gain.     

Errors Disrupt Subsequent Early Attentional Processes

It has been demonstrated that target detection is impaired following an error in an unrelated flanker task. These findings support the idea that the occurrence or processing of unexpected error-like events interfere with subsequent information processing. In the present study, we investigated the effect of errors on early visual ERP components. We therefore combined a flanker task and a visual discrimination task. Additionally, the intertrial interval between both tasks was manipulated in order to investigate the duration of these negative after-effects. The results of the visual discrimination task indicated that the amplitude of the N1 component, which is related to endogenous attention, was significantly decreased following an error, irrespective of the intertrial interval. Additionally, P3 amplitude was attenuated after an erroneous trial, but only in the long-interval condition. These results indicate that low-level attentional processes are impaired after errors.     

The association between affective psychopathic traits,time incarcerated,and cortisol response to psychosocial stress

Previous research has demonstrated that psychopathic personality traits are significantly predictive of blunted cortisol reactivity to a performance-based stressor task (Trier Social Stress Test; TSST) in college students. However, the relationship between cortisol reactivity and psychopathy has not been explored in high risk samples such as incarcerated populations. Further, the role of imprisonment in relation to cortisol stress reactivity has not been previously explored, but could have practical and conceptual consequences in regard to rehabilitation and biological sensitivity to context, respectively. The current study tested the hypotheses that both psychopathic personality traits and amount of time incarcerated are related to cortisol blunting in response to stress among incarcerated young adults. A sample of 49 young adult male offenders was recruited to complete the TSST. Salivary hormone samples were taken just prior to and 20 min post-stressor, and participants were interviewed with the Psychopathy Checklist-Youth Version. Variables quantifying the amount of time at the present facility prior to the date of testing and number of commitments in juvenile facilities were also collected. Correlational analyses indicated that only number of incarcerations was related to blunted cortisol. Hierarchical Linear Modeling revealed that time incarcerated and number of commitments were related to a blunted cortisol response among responders and declining cortisol reactivity among nonresponders, respectively. Controlling for time incarcerated, psychopathic traits were significantly related to cortisol decline in response to the stressor among nonresponders, but were not related to blunted cortisol among responders. Results of this project highlight the potential biological effects of prolonged and repeated incarcerations, and extend our understanding about the relationship between psychopathic traits and cortisol reactivity in an incarcerated sample.     

Feature-based attention in the frontal eye field and area V4 during visual search

When we search for a target in a crowded visual scene, we often use the distinguishing features of the target, such as color or shape, to guide our attention and eye movements. To investigate the neural mechanisms of feature-based attention, we simultaneously recorded neural responses in the frontal eye field (FEF) and area V4 while monkeys performed a visual search task. The responses of cells in both areas were modulated by feature attention, independent of spatial attention, and the magnitude of response enhancement was inversely correlated with the number of saccades needed to find the target. However, an analysis of the latency of sensory and attentional influences on responses suggested that V4 provides bottom-up sensory information about stimulus features, whereas the FEF provides a top-down attentional bias toward target features that modulates sensory processing in V4 and that could be used to guide the eyes to a searched-for target.     

Temporal-Spatial Neural Activation Patterns Linked to Perceptual Encoding of Emotional Salience

It is well known that we continuously filter incoming sensory information, selectively allocating attention to what is important while suppressing distracting or irrelevant information. Yet questions remain about spatiotemporal patterns of neural processes underlying attentional biases toward emotionally significant aspects of the world. One index of affectively biased attention is an emotional variant of an attentional blink (AB) paradigm, which reveals enhanced perceptual encoding for emotionally salient over neutral stimuli under conditions of limited executive attention. The present study took advantage of the high spatial and temporal resolution of magnetoencephalography (MEG) to investigate neural activation related to emotional and neutral targets in an AB task. MEG data were collected while participants performed a rapid stimulus visual presentation task in which two target stimuli were embedded in a stream of distractor words. The first target (T1) was a number and the second (T2) either an emotionally salient or neutral word. Behavioural results replicated previous findings of greater accuracy for emotionally salient than neutral T2 words. MEG source analyses showed that activation in orbitofrontal cortex, characterized by greater power in the theta and alpha bands, and dorsolateral prefrontal activation were associated with successful perceptual encoding of emotionally salient relative to neutral words. These effects were observed between 250 and 550 ms, latencies associated with discrimination of perceived from unperceived stimuli. These data suggest that important nodes of both emotional salience and frontoparietal executive systems are associated with the emotional modulation of the attentional blink.     

Attentional Bias towards Positive Emotion Predicts Stress Resilience

There is extensive evidence for an association between an attentional bias towards emotionally negative stimuli and vulnerability to stress-related psychopathology. Less is known about whether selective attention towards emotionally positive stimuli relates to mental health and stress resilience. The current study used a modified Dot Probe task to investigate if individual differences in attentional biases towards either happy or angry emotional stimuli, or an interaction between these biases, are related to self-reported trait stress resilience. In a nonclinical sample (N = 43), we indexed attentional biases as individual differences in reaction time for stimuli preceded by either happy or angry (compared to neutral) face stimuli. Participants with greater attentional bias towards happy faces (but not angry faces) reported higher trait resilience. However, an attentional bias towards angry stimuli moderated this effect: The attentional bias towards happy faces was only predictive for resilience in those individuals who also endorsed an attentional bias towards angry stimuli. An attentional bias towards positive emotional stimuli may thus be a protective factor contributing to stress resilience, specifically in those individuals who also endorse an attentional bias towards negative emotional stimuli. Our findings therefore suggest a novel target for prevention and treatment interventions addressing stress-related psychopathology.     

Attentional load modulates responses of human primary visual cortex to invisible stimuli

Visual neuroscience has long sought to determine the extent to which stimulus-evoked activity in visual cortex depends on attention and awareness. Some influential theories of consciousness maintain that the allocation of attention is restricted to conscious representations [1, 2]. However, in the load theory of attention [3], competition between task-relevant and task-irrelevant stimuli for limited-capacity attention does not depend on conscious perception of the irrelevant stimuli. The critical test is whether the level of attentional load in a relevant task would determine unconscious neural processing of invisible stimuli. Human participants were scanned with high-field fMRI while they performed a foveal task of low or high attentional load. Irrelevant, invisible monocular stimuli were simultaneously presented peripherally and were continuously suppressed by a flashing mask in the other eye [4]. Attentional load in the foveal task strongly modulated retinotopic activity evoked in primary visual cortex (V1) by the invisible stimuli. Contrary to traditional views [1, 2, 5, 6], we found that availability of attentional capacity determines neural representations related to unconscious processing of continuously suppressed stimuli in human primary visual cortex. Spillover of attention to cortical representations of invisible stimuli (under low load) cannot be a sufficient condition for their awareness.     

Attentional Tuning Resets after Failures of Perceptual Awareness

Key to successfully negotiating our environment is our ability to adapt to current settings based on recent experiences and behaviour. Response conflict paradigms (e.g., the Stroop task) have provided evidence for increases in executive control after errors, leading to slowed responses that are more likely to be correct, and less susceptible to response congruency effects. Here we investigate whether failures of perceptual awareness, rather than failures at decisional or response stages of information processing, lead to similar adjustments in visual attention. We employed an attentional blink task in which subjects often fail to consciously register the second of two targets embedded in a rapid serial visual presentation stream of distractors, and examined how target errors influence performance on subsequent trials. Performance was inferior after Target 2 errors and these inter-trial effects were independent of the temporal lag between the targets and were not due to more global changes in attention across runs of trials. These results shed light on the nature of attentional calibration in response to failures of perceptual consciousness.     

Dissociated deficits in attentional networks in social anxiety and depression

A critical cognitive symptom that is commonly involved in social anxiety and depression is attentional deficit. However, the functional relationship between attentional deficit and these two disorders remains poorly understood. Here, we behaviorally disentangled the three key attentional components(alerting, orienting, and executive control) using the established attentional network task(ANT) to investigate how social anxiety and depression are related to deficits in these attention components. We identified a double dissociation between the symptoms of social anxiety and depression and the attentional component deficits when processing non-emotional stimuli. While individuals vulnerable to social anxiety exhibited deficits in the orienting component, individuals vulnerable to depression were impaired in the executive control component. Our findings showed that social anxiety and depression were associated with deficits in different attentional components, which are not specific to emotional information.     

Investigation of Attentional Bias in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder with and without Depression in Visual Search

Whether Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is associated with an increased attentional bias to emotive stimuli remains controversial. Additionally, it is unclear whether comorbid depression modulates abnormal emotional processing in OCD. This study examined attentional bias to OC-relevant scenes using a visual search task. Controls, non-depressed and depressed OCD patients searched for their personally selected positive images amongst their negative distractors, and vice versa. Whilst the OCD groups were slower than healthy individuals in rating the images, there were no group differences in the magnitude of negative bias to concern-related scenes. A second experiment employing a common set of images replicated the results on an additional sample of OCD patients. Although there was a larger bias to negative OC-related images without pre-exposure overall, no group differences in attentional bias were observed. However, OCD patients subsequently rated the images more slowly and more negatively, again suggesting post-attentional processing abnormalities. The results argue against a robust attentional bias in OCD patients, regardless of their depression status and speak to generalized difficulties disengaging from negative valence stimuli. Rather, post-attentional processing abnormalities may account for differences in emotional processing in OCD.     

Attentional bias in the radial and vertical dimensions of space

Under visual guidance, healthy subjects usually misbisect radial lines farther than, and vertical lines above the true center. It was suggested that radial and vertical misbisection depended on the presence of an attentional bias toward far/upper space. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether such attentional bias depends on a single mechanism or on separate mechanisms. Ninety participants were asked to bisect lines radially and vertically oriented. The results confirmed the presence of a consistent bisection bias farther than (radial lines), and above (vertical lines) the true center. Furthermore, there was a significant correlation between radial and vertical bisection errors. These findings suggest that a single neural mechanism is involved in producing the attentional bias toward far/upper space.     

Attentional Prioritization of Infant Faces Is Limited to Own-Race Infants

Background

Recent evidence indicates that infant faces capture attention automatically, presumably to elicit caregiving behavior from adults and leading to greater probability of progeny survival. Elsewhere, evidence demonstrates that people show deficiencies in the processing of other-race relative to own-race faces. We ask whether this other-race effect impacts on attentional attraction to infant faces. Using a dot-probe task to reveal the spatial allocation of attention, we investigate whether other-race infants capture attention.

Principal Findings

South Asian and White participants (young adults aged 18–23 years) responded to a probe shape appearing in a location previously occupied by either an infant face or an adult face; across trials, the race (South Asian/White) of the faces was manipulated. Results indicated that participants were faster to respond to probes that appeared in the same location as infant faces than adult faces, but only on own-race trials.

Conclusions/Significance

Own-race infant faces attract attention, but other-race infant faces do not. Sensitivity to face-specific care-seeking cues in other-race kindenschema may be constrained by interracial contact and experience.     

Enhanced Attentional Bias towards Sexually Explicit Cues in Individuals with and without Compulsive Sexual Behaviours

Compulsive sexual behaviour (CSB) is relatively common and has been associated with significant distress and psychosocial impairments. CSB has been conceptualized as either an impulse control disorder or a non-substance ‘behavioural’ addiction. Substance use disorders are commonly associated with attentional biases to drug cues which are believed to reflect processes of incentive salience. Here we assess male CSB subjects compared to age-matched male healthy controls using a dot probe task to assess attentional bias to sexually explicit cues. We show that compared to healthy volunteers, CSB subjects have enhanced attentional bias to explicit cues but not neutral cues particularly for early stimuli latency. Our findings suggest enhanced attentional bias to explicit cues possibly related to an early orienting attentional response. This finding dovetails with our recent observation that sexually explicit videos were associated with greater activity in a neural network similar to that observed in drug-cue-reactivity studies. Greater desire or wanting rather than liking was further associated with activity in this neural network. These studies together provide support for an incentive motivation theory of addiction underlying the aberrant response towards sexual cues in CSB.     

A Dual Task Procedure Combined with Rapid Serial Visual Presentation to Test Attentional Blink for Nontargets

When viewers search for targets in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream, if two targets are presented within about 500 msec of each other, the first target may be easy to spot but the second is likely to be missed. This phenomenon of attentional blink (AB) has been widely studied to probe the temporal capacity of attention for detecting visual targets. However, with the typical procedure of AB experiments, it is not possible to examine how the processing of non-target items in RSVP may be affected by attention. This paper describes a novel dual task procedure combined with RSVP to test effects of AB for nontargets at varied stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). In an exemplar experiment, a target category was first displayed, followed by a sequence of 8 nouns. If one of the nouns belonged to the target category, participants would respond ‘yes’ at the end of the sequence, otherwise participants would respond ‘no’. Two 2-alternative forced choice memory tasks followed the response to determine if participants remembered the words immediately before or after the target, as well as a random word from another part of the sequence. In a second exemplar experiment, the same design was used, except that 1) the memory task was counterbalanced into two groups with SOAs of either 120 or 240 msec and 2) three memory tasks followed the sequence and tested remembrance for nontarget nouns in the sequence that could be anywhere from 3 items prior the target noun position to 3 items following the target noun position. Representative results from a previously published study demonstrate that our procedure can be used to examine divergent effects of attention that not only enhance targets but also suppress nontargets. Here we show results from a representative participant that replicated the previous finding.      

Cortisol awakening response and cognitive performance in hypertensive and normotensive older people

Healthy older people with a cortisol awakening response (CAR) of decreased magnitude show worse frontal cortex-related cognitive performance. Systemic hypertension has been related to a CAR of decreased magnitude. Additionally, worse executive function and processing speed have been observed in older people with systemic hypertension. This is the first study to examine the relationship between the CAR (measured with six saliva samples at home on two consecutive weekdays) and cognitive performance, in both hypertensive (n = 26) and normotensive (n = 28) older people (from 56 to 78 years old). Hypertensive participants showed lower morning cortisol secretion, and they also woke up earlier. No differences in CAR were observed. A CAR of decreased magnitude was related to worse executive function in both hypertensive and normotensive participants, but to slower processing speed only in normotensive participants. Being treated with antihypertensive for a longer period of time was related to a CAR of increased magnitude and better performance on executive function. Our findings suggest that earlier awakening time in hypertensive older people might underlie the lower overall morning cortisol secretion observed in previous studies. Additionally, this study confirms that a dysregulation of the CAR is related to worse executive function, and it extends this association to hypertensive older people. Finally, it is worth noting that hypertension may moderate the relationship between CAR and processing speed.     

Impaired Contingent Attentional Capture Predicts Reduced Working Memory Capacity in Schizophrenia

Although impairments in working memory (WM) are well documented in schizophrenia, the specific factors that cause these deficits are poorly understood. In this study, we hypothesized that a heightened susceptibility to attentional capture at an early stage of visual processing would result in working memory encoding problems. 30 patients with schizophrenia and 28 demographically matched healthy participants were presented with a search array and asked to report the orientation of the target stimulus. In some of the trials, a flanker stimulus preceded the search array that either matched the color of the target (relevant-flanker capture) or appeared in a different color (irrelevant-flanker capture). Working memory capacity was determined in each individual using the visual change detection paradigm. Patients needed considerably more time to find the target in the no-flanker condition. After adjusting the individual exposure time, both groups showed equivalent capture costs in the irrelevant-flanker condition. However, in the relevant-flanker condition, capture costs were increased in patients compared to controls when the stimulus onset asynchrony between the flanker and the search array was high. Moreover, the increase in relevant capture costs correlated negatively with working memory capacity. This study demonstrates preserved stimulus-driven attentional capture but impaired contingent attentional capture associated with low working memory capacity in schizophrenia. These findings suggest a selective impairment of top-down attentional control in schizophrenia, which may impair working memory encoding.     

Attentional Biases toward Attractive Alternatives and Rivals: Mechanisms Involved in Relationship Maintenance among Chinese Women

A long-term romantic relationship can offer many benefits to committed individuals. Thus, humans possess relationship maintenance mechanisms to protect against threats from those who serve as attractive alternatives or intrasexual rivals. Many studies have indicated that romantic love can act as a commitment device to activate these mechanisms. To examine the attentional bias associated with relationship maintenance among 108 college students (49 single and 59 committed females) in China, we used a semantic priming procedure to activate mental representations associated with romantic love and then asked participants to complete a dot-probe task for the purpose of making a distinction between the engage and disengage components of attention. No significant engaging effects toward attractive faces were observed among committed females, but the following significant disengaging effects were found: when primed with romantic love, single females showed increased attention toward and difficulty in disengaging from attractive male faces, whereas females already in a committed relationship did not alter their attention, remaining as inattentive to attractive alternatives as they were in the baseline condition. In addition, committed females responded to love priming by exhibiting difficulty in disengaging from attractive rivals. The present findings provide evidence in the Chinese cultural context for the existence of early-stage attentional processes in the domain of relationship maintenance that committed Chinese females protected an ongoing relationship by not only being inattentive to attractive males who could serve as attractive alternatives, but also being more attentive to attractive females who could be potential rivals when mental representations associated with romantic love were primed.     

Personality Type Influences Attentional Bias in Individuals with Chronic Back Pain

Attentional biases reflect an individual’s selective attention to salient stimuli within their environment, for example an experience of back pain. Eysenck suggests that different personality types show different attentional biases to threatening information. This study is the first to test Eysenck’s theory within a chronic back pain population by investigating the attentional biases of four different personality types using a back pain specific dot-probe paradigm. Participants were 70 volunteers (45 female) recruited from a back rehabilitation program at an NHS Trust. The four groups were selected on their trait anxiety and defensiveness scores: defensive high-anxious; high-anxious; repressor and non-extreme. Participants completed a dot probe task comprising 20 practice trials and 250 experimental trials. The experimental trials contained 100 threat-neutral pairs, 100 positive-neutral pairs and 50 neutral-neutral image pairings. The threat images were taken from the Photograph Series of Daily Activities (PHODA) and the neutral and positive images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) image bank. The results provided partial support for Eysenck’s theory; defensive high-anxious individuals showed an attentional bias for threatening information compared to high-anxious individuals who demonstrated no bias. Repressors showed an avoidant bias to threatening images and an attentional bias to positive stimuli relative to neutral images. The clear difference in responses demonstrated by high-anxious individuals who vary in defensiveness highlight the need for separate investigation of these heterogeneous groups and help to explain the cognitive processes of defensive high-anxious individuals within a pain population. The demonstration of an attentional bias in this group to threatening information could explain why defensive high-anxious individuals are more likely to re-present for treatment.