Load Theory of Selective Attention and Cognitive Control.

Lavie, Nilli; Hirst, Aleksandra; Fockert, Jan W. de; Viding, Essi

doi:10.1037/0096-3445.133.3.339

Cited by 1,498 publications

(1,864 citation statements)

References 66 publications

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“…One randomly-determined block was the high WM load block. Participants were presented with six digits for two seconds before each vignette; following the comprehension question, participants were presented with a single digit, and were asked to indicate with a key-press whether they saw this digit before the vignette (new foil digits were presented on 50% of trials, see Lavie et al, 2004). The low WM load block was identical except that only one digit was presented before each vignette.…”

Section: Did You Stand Up To Speak? (Yes/no)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Working memory regulates trait anxiety-related threat processing biases.

Booth¹,

Mackintosh

Sharma

2017

Emotion

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High trait anxious individuals tend to show biased processing of threat. Correlational evidence suggests that executive control could be used to regulate such threat-processing. On this basis, we hypothesised that trait anxiety-related cognitive biases regarding threat should be exaggerated when executive control is experimentally impaired by loading working memory. In Study 1, 68 undergraduates read ambiguous vignettes under high and low working memory load; later, their interpretations of these vignettes were assessed via a recognition test. Trait anxiety predicted biased interpretation of social threat vignettes under high working memory load, but not under low working memory load. In Study 2, 53 undergraduates completed a dot probe task with fear-conditioned Japanese characters serving as threat stimuli. Trait anxiety predicted attentional bias to the threat stimuli but, again, this only occurred under high working memory load. Interestingly however, actual eye movements toward the threat stimuli were only associated with state anxiety and this was not moderated by working memory load, suggesting that executive control regulates biased threat-processing downstream of initial input processes such as orienting. These results suggest that cognitive loads can exacerbate trait anxiety-related cognitive biases, and therefore represent a useful tool for assessing cognitive biases in future research. More importantly, since biased threat-processing has been implicated in the aetiology and maintenance of anxiety, poor executive control may be a risk factor for anxiety disorders.

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Section: Did You Stand Up To Speak? (Yes/no)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Working memory regulates trait anxiety-related threat processing biases.

Booth¹,

Mackintosh

Sharma

2017

Emotion

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“…We could thus, within a Bayesian framework, characterize the brain connectivity of the two groups of subjects, as well as their differences. We hypothesized that controls would display a connectivity network compatible with the Load Theory (Lavie et al, 2004) with a reduced drive of the activity in V4 in high attentional load mediated either by a direct action of P on V4 or by an indirect decrease of the gating from V1 to V4 (Schwartz et al, 2005;Stephan et al, 2008). We hypothesized that the connectivity of this visuo-attentional system would differ between MDD and controls in two distinct ways.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Neuroimaging studies showed that these symptoms are mainly associated with impairments within fronto-limbic network involved in affective regulation and fronto-parietal networks involved in attention and executive functions (Mayberg et al, 1999). Lavie et al (2004Lavie et al ( , 2005 proposed the 'Load Theory' of attention in which distractor rejection depends on the level and type of attentional load involved by the current task. This theory of attention and cognitive control implies reciprocal interactions for the processing of taskrelevant and task-irrelevant information.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Depression alters “top-down” visual attention: A dynamic causal modeling comparison between depressed and healthy subjects

et al. 2011

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Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we recently demonstrated that nonmedicated patients with a first episode of unipolar major depression (MDD) compared to matched controls exhibited an abnormal neural filtering of irrelevant visual information (Desseilles et al., 2009). During scanning, subjects performed a visual attention task imposing two different levels of attentional load at fixation (low or high), while task-irrelevant colored stimuli were presented in the periphery. In the present study, we focused on the visuo-attentional system and used "Dynamic Causal Modeling" (DCM) on the same dataset to assess how attention influences a network of three dynamicallyinterconnected brain regions (visual areas V1 and V4, and intraparietal sulcus (P), differentially in MDD patients and healthy controls. Bayesian model selection (BMS) and model space partitioning (MSP) were used to determine the best model in each population. The best model for the controls revealed that the increase of parietal activity by high attention load was selectively associated with a negative modulation of P on V4, consistent with high attention reducing the processing of irrelevant colored peripheral stimuli. The best model accounting for the data from the MDD patients showed that both low and high attention levels exerted modulatory effects on P. The present results document abnormal effective connectivity across visuoattentional networks in MDD, which likely contributes to deficient attentional filtering of information.

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“…The salient study context "assessment of sexual attractiveness" could have encouraged homophobic behavior of male participants (Jellison, McConell, & Gabriel, 2004). It should be noted that these regulatory mechanisms might have required cognitive resources (Lavie, Hirst, Fockert, & Viding, 2004), so that task monitoring and performance could have been compounded. This might have been a reason for men's comparatively high prosaccadic error rates while viewing male stimuli.…”

Section: Prosaccadic Results Of Menmentioning

confidence: 99%