Threat detection: Behavioral practices in animals and humans

Eilam, David; Izhar, Rony; Mort, Joel

doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2010.08.002

Cited by 121 publications

(91 citation statements)

References 91 publications

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“…These behaviors may be as benign as leg-swinging in school children who are working on a stressful math examination (23) or alarming stereotypies that may cause self-injury (24). Studies with neurologically healthy humans and animals reveal that the ritualistic behaviors that emerge under conditions of unpredictability serve as a calming response to an externally imposed stressor (25,26). Taken together, these results suggest that rituals and an insistence on sameness may be a consequence of, and a way to mitigate, anxiety arising out of unpredictability.…”

Section: The Pia Hypothesis As a Partial Account Of The Autism Phenotypementioning

confidence: 83%

Autism as a disorder of prediction

Sinha

Kjelgaard

Gandhi

et al. 2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

480

414

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A rich collection of empirical findings accumulated over the past three decades attests to the diversity of traits that constitute the autism phenotypes. It is unclear whether subsets of these traits share any underlying causality. This lack of a cohesive conceptualization of the disorder has complicated the search for broadly effective therapies, diagnostic markers, and neural/genetic correlates. In this paper, we describe how theoretical considerations and a review of empirical data lead to the hypothesis that some salient aspects of the autism phenotype may be manifestations of an underlying impairment in predictive abilities. With compromised prediction skills, an individual with autism inhabits a seemingly "magical" world wherein events occur unexpectedly and without cause. Immersion in such a capricious environment can prove overwhelming and compromise one's ability to effectively interact with it. If validated, this hypothesis has the potential of providing unifying insights into multiple aspects of autism, with attendant benefits for improving diagnosis and therapy.probabilistic processing | endophenotype | Markov models | theory | heterogeneity

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Section: The Pia Hypothesis As a Partial Account Of The Autism Phenotypementioning

confidence: 83%

Autism as a disorder of prediction

Sinha

Kjelgaard

Gandhi

et al. 2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

480

414

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For example, contrast sensitivity improves after the presentation of a threatening face, but not after the presentation of a neutral face or an upside-down threatening face (Phelps, Ling, & Carrasco, 2006). It has been argued that visible and abstract potential threats elicit different responses (Eilam, Izhar, & Mort, 2011). The defensive behavior elicited by a perceptible threat takes on three forms: freezing (to hide from the enemy's attention), fleeing (to increase the distance from the danger) or fighting (to dissuade the enemy).…”

Section: Threat-relevant Stimuli: Increased Alertness and Processing mentioning

confidence: 99%

Posterror speeding after threat-detection failure.

Caudek¹,

Ceccarini²,

Sica³

2015

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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Cognitive control enables individuals to rapidly adapt to changing task demands.To investigate error-driven adjustments in cognitive control, we considered performance changes in post-error trials, when participants performed a visual search task requiring to detect angry, happy, or neutral facial expressions in crowds of faces. We hypothesized that the failure to detect a potential threat (angry face) would prompt a different post-error adjustment than the failure to detect a nonthreatening target (happy or neutral face). Indeed, in three sets of experiments we found evidence of post-error speeding, in the first case, and of post-error slowing, in the second. Previous results indicate that a threatening stimulus can improve the efficiency of visual search. The results of the present study show that a similar effect can also be observed when participants fail to detect a threat.The impact of threat-detection failure on cognitive control, as revealed by the present study, suggests that post-error adjustments should be understood as the product of domain-specific mechanisms that are strongly influenced by affective information, rather than as the effect of a general-purpose error-monitoring system. 1

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“…The concept of risk assessment has been derived from field studies on antipredator vigilance in a wide variety of species (Bednekoff and Lima 1998;Eilam et al 2010) and from laboratory research on antipredator defense in rodents (Blanchard and Blanchard 1989;Blanchard et al 1995). In the field studies, vigilance is commonly defined in terms of searching/scanning activity and is typically measured as the tendency of an animal to scan the environment (i.e., to look around), as opposed to eating, grooming, sleeping, or other nondefensive behaviors (Lima 1987).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, apart from scan (head-out) frequency, scanning parameters per se were rarely quantified (Krebs et al 1997), perhaps because of difficulties in their manual scoring in rodents. Nonetheless, vigilant scanning of the environment appears to be a major, and presumably the most frequently engaged, risk assessment activity in various species (Bednekoff and Lima 1998;Eilam et al 2010). As such, it needs to be more fully incorporated into the ethological analysis of rodent defensive behavior.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%