Attentional bias to moving spiders in spider fearful individuals

Vrijsen, Janna N.; Fleurkens, Pascal; Nieuwboer, Wieteke; Rinck, Mike

doi:10.1016/j.janxdis.2008.11.002

Cited by 28 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…That is, uncertainty led to generalized hypervigilance when phobics were not able to predict the appearance of threats. Moreover, another study with animal phobia individuals also revealed that uncertainty (not sure where a spider is going to be located) increased attentional bias towards the threat in phobics and healthy controls [13]. Contrary to this last finding, our control individuals exhibited higher attentional bias towards threat when conditions were more predictable and controllable ("regular" and/or "up" trials).…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 76%

“…It has been postulated that some contextual variables may account for these divergences, either the position of the dot or the regularity among trials. Preliminary data suggest that both factors may alter attentional bias by increasing the degree of uncertainty when individuals cannot predict the appearance of threats [13]. Moreover, research usually relies on an accurate threshold presentation (e.g., 100/200 milliseconds) to determine whether stimuli are detected by covert (preconscious) from threatening stimuli when these appear at irregular (vs. regular) intervals.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Different Patterns of Attentional Bias in Subjects with Spider Phobia: A Dot Probe Task using Virtual Reality Environment

Frías¹

2015

Arch Depress Anxiety

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Background: Cognitive theories posit that small animal phobics develop a hypervigilanceavoidance attentional pattern when coping with threat. However, empirical research has failed to obtain consistent results. We aimed at addressing this issue by diminishing the methodological flaws that hinder the internal and ecological validity of previous studies. Methods:In this research, 34 spider fearful and 33 non-fearful participants completed a probe dot task using virtual reality environments. A subjective threshold for each participant was established. Position of the probe (low vs. up) and interval between trials (regular vs. irregular) were controlled.Results: Compared to non-fearful individuals, spider phobics showed preconscious attentional bias towards threat in unexpected (low and irregular) trials. Moreover, phobics tended to display conscious attentional bias away from threat in unexpected (irregular) trials. Severity of fear did not correlate with attentional bias. Limitations:We did not use eye movement tracking as well as potential biomarkers for attentional bias (e.g., event-related potentials). The risk of type-I error cannot be ruled out. Conclusions:These findings partly support the hyper vigilance-avoidance pattern by considering some contextual factors that may enhance uncertainty in phobics. The alleged role of attentional bias in phobias is also questioned.(conscious) processing [7,14]. This methodological flaw precludes the determination of subjective threshold for each subject by assuming a generalized (objective) awareness threshold for the whole sample. Furthermore, the ecological validity of these studies is still inadequate, and most of them employ threatening pictures to assess phobia to spider rather than more realistic environments [5,7,15]. In this framework, virtual reality may be considered an alternative approach to enhancing the ecological validity from these studies by using more realistic, immersive, and interactive scenarios. To date, virtual reality has been mainly adapted to treat individuals diagnosed with different mental disorders such as anxiety disorders or eating disorders [16][17][18]. However, its application in basic cognitive research is lacking. Aims and hypothesesBased on previous research, our study aimed at elucidating the time course of emotional processing of threat in individuals with spider phobia by increasing the internal and ecological validity of the results obtained. We hypothesized that phobic individuals, relative to nonphobic controls, will display a preconscious attentional bias towards threatening stimuli as well as a conscious attentional bias away from threatening stimuli. In addition, we postulate that this result will be altered by the degree of uncertainty and uncontrollability concerning the appearance and position of the threatening stimuli. That is, phobic individuals will exhibit enhanced preconscious attentional bias towards as well as increased conscious attentional bias away

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 76%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Different Patterns of Attentional Bias in Subjects with Spider Phobia: A Dot Probe Task using Virtual Reality Environment

Frías¹

2015

Arch Depress Anxiety

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“…Convergently, and in line with studies showing enhanced fear and freezing responses to dynamic threatening stimuli (Courtney et al, 2010;Sagliano et al, 2014), existing data show that dynamic negative stimuli grab attention to a greater extent than both dynamic nonemotional events and static emotional events (Carretié et al, 2009;Vrijsen et al, 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 55%

Magnocellular Bias in Exogenous Attention to Biologically Salient Stimuli as Revealed by Manipulating Their Luminosity and Color

Carretié

Kessel

García-Rubio

et al. 2017

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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Exogenous attention is a set of mechanisms that allow us to detect and reorient toward salient events-such as appetitive or aversive-that appear out of the current focus of attention. The nature of these mechanisms, particularly the involvement of the parvocellular and magnocellular visual processing systems, was explored. Thirty-four participants performed a demanding digit categorization task while salient (spiders or S) and neutral (wheels or W) stimuli were presented as distractors under two figure-ground formats: heterochromatic/isoluminant (exclusively processed by the parvocellular system, Par trials) and isochromatic/heteroluminant (preferentially processed by the magnocellular system, Mag trials). This resulted in four conditions: SPar, SMag, WPar, and WMag. Behavioral (RTs and error rates in the task) and electrophysiological (ERPs) indices of exogenous attention were analyzed. Behavior showed greater attentional capture by SMag than by SPar distractors and enhanced modulation of SMag capture as fear of spiders reported by participants increased. ERPs reflected a sequence from magnocellular dominant (P1p, ≃120 msec) to both magnocellular and parvocellular processing (N2p and P2a, ≃200 msec). Importantly, amplitudes in one N2p subcomponent were greater to SMag than to SPar and WMag distractors, indicating greater magnocellular sensitivity to saliency. Taking together, results support a magnocellular bias in exogenous attention toward distractors of any nature during initial processing, a bias that remains in later stages when biologically salient distractors are present.

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“…Studies on attention bias showed that fearful or phobic individuals tend to engage attention more quickly in their feared stimuli than in unfeared stimuli (e.g., Mogg and Bradley, 2006; Vrijsen et al, 2009); moreover, these individuals are slow in disengaging attention from their feared stimuli compared with unfeared stimuli (e.g., Fox et al, 2001, 2002; Yiend and Mathews, 2001). In addition, fearful or phobic individuals show deficient ability to ignore fear-related distractors compared with non-fearful healthy controls (e.g., Gerdes et al, 2008; Okon-Singer et al, 2011) 2 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Varying expectancies and attention bias in phobic and non-phobic individuals

Aue¹,

Guex²,

Chauvigné³

et al. 2013

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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Phobic individuals display an attention bias to phobia-related information and biased expectancies regarding the likelihood of being faced with such stimuli. Notably, although attention and expectancy biases are core features in phobia and anxiety disorders, these biases have mostly been investigated separately and their causal impact has not been examined. We hypothesized that these biases might be causally related. Spider phobic and low spider fearful control participants performed a visual search task in which they specified whether the deviant animal in a search array was a spider or a bird. Shorter reaction times (RTs) for spiders than for birds in this task reflect an attention bias toward spiders. Participants' expectancies regarding the likelihood of these animals being the deviant in the search array were manipulated by presenting verbal cues. Phobics were characterized by a pronounced and persistent attention bias toward spiders; controls displayed slower RTs for birds than for spiders only when spider cues had been presented. More important, we found RTs for spider detections to be virtually unaffected by the expectancy cues in both groups, whereas RTs for bird detections showed a clear influence of the cues. Our results speak to the possibility that evolution has formed attentional systems that are specific to the detection of phylogenetically salient stimuli such as threatening animals; these systems may not be as penetrable to variations in (experimentally induced) expectancies as those systems that are used for the detection of non-threatening stimuli. In sum, our findings highlight the relation between expectancies and attention engagement in general. However, expectancies may play a greater role in attention engagement in safe environments than in threatening environments.

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Attentional bias to moving spiders in spider fearful individuals

Cited by 28 publications

References 19 publications

Different Patterns of Attentional Bias in Subjects with Spider Phobia: A Dot Probe Task using Virtual Reality Environment

Different Patterns of Attentional Bias in Subjects with Spider Phobia: A Dot Probe Task using Virtual Reality Environment

Magnocellular Bias in Exogenous Attention to Biologically Salient Stimuli as Revealed by Manipulating Their Luminosity and Color

Varying expectancies and attention bias in phobic and non-phobic individuals

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