Although research has consistently revealed the presence of a general attentional bias towards threat, empirical and theoretical ambiguity exists in determining whether attentional biases are comprised of facilitated attention to threat, difficulty in disengagement from threat, or both, as well as whether attentional biases reflect automatic or strategic processes. This paper reviews empirical investigations across four common assessment tasks: the Stroop (masked and unmasked), dot probe, visual search, and the Posner tasks. Although the review finds inconsistencies both within and between assessment tasks, the evidence suggests that attentional biases towards threat are comprised of each of the phenomenological characteristics addressed in this paper. Contemporary theoretical models of attentional biases in anxiety are summarized and critically reviewed in light of the current evidence. Suggestions for future research are addressed, including a need to investigate the psychometric properties of the assessment tasks, to utilize consistent theoretically driven operationalizations of attentional biases, and to provide a temporal description of the characteristics of attentional biases towards threat.

A wealth of research demonstrates attentional biases toward threat in the anxiety disorders. Several models have been advanced to explain these biases in anxiety, yet the mechanisms comprising and mediating the biases remain unclear. In the present article, we review evidence regarding the mechanisms of attentional biases through careful examination of the components of attentional bias, the mechanisms underlying these components, and the stage of information processing during which the biases occur. Facilitated attention, difficulty in disengagement, and attentional avoidance comprise the components of attentional bias. A threat detection mechanism likely underlies facilitated attention, a process that may be neurally centered around the amygdala. Attentional control ability likely underlies difficulty in disengagement, emotion regulation goals likely underlie attentional avoidance, and both of these processes may be neurally centered around prefrontal cortex functioning. The threat detection mechanism may be a mostly automatic process, attentional avoidance may be a mostly strategic process, and difficulty in disengagement may be a mixture of automatic and strategic processing. Recommendations for future research are discussed.

Although it is well known that anxious adults show selective attention to threatening stimuli, research investigating attentional bias in children with anxiety has produced mixed results. The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive analysis of studies investigating attentional bias in children with anxiety. Using a systematic search for articles which included both children with anxiety and reported data suitable for a meta-analysis, 38 articles were identified involving 4221 subjects (anxiety n02=022222). We used a random effects meta-analysis with standardized mean difference as our primary outcome to estimate between- and within-group effects of attentional bias towards threat-related information in children with anxiety. Overall, children with anxiety showed a significantly greater bias to threat-related stimuli, compared to controls ( d 02=020.21). Children with anxiety also showed a significant bias to threat-related stimuli, over neutral stimuli ( d 02=020.54), which was greater than the bias shown by control children ( d 02=020.15). Specific variables in attentional bias were also explored, with varying results. The review concluded that anxious children do show a similar bias towards threatening stimuli as has been documented in adults, albeit to a lesser degree and this bias is moderated by age, such that the difference between anxious and control children increases with age. Given the small number of studies in some areas, future research is needed to understand the precise conditions under which anxious children exhibit selective attentional biases to threat-related stimuli.

61Four virtual park scenarios elicited the intended emotional states.61Presence levels were the same across different virtual environments.61Skin conductance level seems to be a poor indicator of presence.

Reviews the non-fiction book 'The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception,' by James J. Gibson.

Facial gestures have been given an increasingly critical role in models of emotion. The biological significance of interindividual transmission of emotional signals is a pivotal assumption for placing the face in a central position in these models. This assumption invited a logical corollary, examined in this article: Face-processing should be highly efficient. Three experiments documented an asymmetry in the processing of emotionally discrepant faces embedded in crowds. The results suggested that threatening faces pop out of crowds, perhaps as a result of a preattentive, parallel search for signals of direct threat.

Most models of visual search, whether involving overt eye movements or covert shifts of attention, are based on the concept of a saliency map, that is, an explicit two-dimensional map that encodes the saliency or conspicuity of objects in the visual environment. Competition among neurons in this map gives rise to a single winning location that corresponds to the next attended target. Inhibiting this location automatically allows the system to attend to the next most salient location. We describe a detailed computer implementation of such a scheme, focusing on the problem of combining information across modalities, here orientation, intensity and color information, in a purely stimulus-driven manner. The model is applied to common psychophysical stimuli as well as to a very demanding visual search task. Its successful performance is used to address the extent to which the primate visual system carries out visual search via one or more such saliency maps and how this can be tested.

Stimuli that are clearly positive or negative (hence valence-laden stimuli) have the potential to interrupt unrelated task processing. A typical example is the emotional Stroop effect (ESE) in which responding to a certain task feature (e.g., color) is delayed by the presentation of task-irrelevant valent stimuli (e.g., negative pictures) compared to valence-neutral stimuli. Here we scrutinize which processes are slowed down by irrelevant but valent stimulation. In Experiment 1, participants performed in a Psychological Refractory Period (PRP) experiment with tone discrimination as Task 1 and color discrimination as Task 2. Importantly, colors in Task 2 were accompanied by valent or neutral pictures. Valent pictures delayed responding in Task 2 (thus an ESE) and this delay was additive to the time interval between tasks. In Experiment 2, task order was reversed and the ESE in Task 1 fully propagated to the Task 2 tone discrimination. These results imply that irrelevant valence-laden stimulation delays capacity-limited processes, and we suggest that this is a late perceptual process acting on stimulus categorization.

In a face-in-the-crowd setting, the authors examined visual search for photographically reproduced happy, angry, and fearful target faces among neutral distractor faces in 3 separate experiments. Contrary to the hypothesis, happy targets were consistently detected more quickly and accurately than angry and fearful targets, as were directed compared with averted targets. There was no consistent effect of social anxiety. A facial emotion recognition experiment suggested that the happy search advantage could be due to the ease of processing happy faces. In the final experiment with perceptually controlled schematic faces, the authors reported more effective detection of angry than happy faces. This angry advantage was most obvious for highly socially anxious individuals when their social fear was experimentally enhanced.

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.

Fear is one of our most basic emotions. It is an important social signal and alerts us to when a situation is safe or risky. Interestingly, not all fears are created equal: Several researchers have proposed that humans develop specific fears, such as fear of threatening stimuli, more readily than others. Here we discuss three major theories of fear acquisition, and consider the possibility that some fears are privileged in learning. Second, we review a growing literature that suggests that humans have perceptual biases that quickly draw attention to threatening stimuli in the environment. In particular, we highlight recent developmental work that shows that even infants and young children respond rapidly to the presence of threat well before they acquire any threat-relevant fears. Finally, we argue that such biases may play a causal role in privileging fear learning for certain threats, and we suggest directions for future work that can clarify whether early biases in perception indeed facilitate the development of our most common fears.

Abstract There has been much controversy around the relationship between anxiety and attentional processing of threat-related information. The purpose of this study was to examine how threatening facial expressions affect attentional processing, according to the level of trait anxiety. Through visual search tasks, two different components of attentional bias to threat were investigated: engagement and disengagement of attention from an angry face. Two main results were found. First, reaction times (RTs) were slower in detecting the absence of a discrepant face in the all angry-display conditions rather than other expression conditions; however, there was no difference between anxiety groups. Second, the difference in search efficiency for the angry versus happy target was significant within the high-anxiety group but not within the low-anxiety group. The results suggest that the detection process for angry faces is more efficient for highly anxious people. On the other hand, the time to disengage attention from angry faces was not associated with anxiety level. Copyright 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The time course of attentional biases for spider stimuli was assessed in two groups of individuals with high or low levels of spider fear. Pairs of photographs of spiders and cats were presented in a visual probe task with three exposure durations: 200, 500 and 2000 ms. Results indicated greater attentional bias for spider stimuli in high fear, than in low fear, individuals in the 200 ms condition. The attentional bias in the high fear group significantly reduced as stimulus exposure duration increased, with no significant biases found in the longer exposure conditions. Results support the view that high fear is associated with an enhanced initial attentional bias for fear-relevant stimuli, but that this attentional bias is not maintained over time.

Abstract Attentional biases for threat stimuli were assessed in high and low trait anxious subjects (n = 66) using a probe detection task. To examine the effects of trait anxiety and situational stressors, each subject was tested three times: Under no stress, laboratory-induced stress, and examination-induced stress. To evaluate the role of awareness, half the word stimuli were presented very briefly (14 msec) and masked, and the other half were presented for 500 msec without a mask. Results showed that high trait anxious subjects under exam stress showed an attentional bias towards unmasked threat stimuli compared with low trait subjects. This effect was not found under lab-induced stress, suggesting that the attentional bias for unmasked threat in high trait subjects may be a function of a prolonged stressor, rather than a transient increase in state anxiety. The results from the masked exposure condition were not predicted; high trait anxious subjects shifted attention towards the spatial location of threat words despite lack of awareness of their lexical content, but this bias was only apparent in the no-stress condition. The results are discussed in relation to recent cognitive theories of anxiety.

In this paper we present an evolutionary analysis of attention to stimuli that are threatening from an evolutionary perspective, such as angry faces and snakes. We review data showing that angry, photographically depicted angry faces are more rapidly detected than happy faces in a visual search setting provided that they are male and that distractors are redundant in the sense that they are drawn from a small set of faces. Following Isbell's (2009) novel Snake Detection Theory, we predicted that snakes, as the prototypical predators, should be more rapidly detected than spiders, given that spiders have provided less of a predatory threat for primates. We review a series of experiments from our laboratory showing that snakes indeed are more rapidly detected than spiders provided that the target stimuli are presented in a demanding visual context, such as many distractor stimuli, or in peripheral vision. Furthermore, they are more distracting than spiders on the performance of a primary attention task. Because snakes were not affected by perceptual load, whereas spiders followed the usual rule of better detection with low perceptual load, we concluded that attending to snakes might constitute an evolutionary adaptation.

Theories of emotion propose that responses to emotional pictures can occur independently of whether or not people are aware of the picture content. Because evidence from dissociation paradigms is inconclusive, we manipulated picture awareness gradually and studied whether emotional responses varied with degree of awareness. Spider fearful and non-fearful participants viewed pictures of spiders and flowers at four levels of backward masking while electrodermal activity and heart rate were measured continuously. Recognition ratings confirmed that participants picture awareness decreased with masking. Critically, effects of spider fear on emotion ratings and heart rate also decreased with masking. These findings suggest that effects of spider fear on emotion ratings and heart rate are closely related to picture awareness.

Abstract Previous research has provided inconsistent results regarding visual search for emotional faces, yielding evidence for either anger superiority (i.e., more efficient search for angry faces) or happiness superiority effects (i.e., more efficient search for happy faces), suggesting that these results do not reflect on emotional expression, but on emotion (un-)related low-level perceptual features. The present study investigated possible factors mediating anger/happiness superiority effects; specifically search strategy (fixed vs. variable target search; Experiment 1), stimulus choice (Nimstim database vs. Ekman & Friesen database; Experiments 1 and 2), and emotional intensity (Experiment 3 and 3a). Angry faces were found faster than happy faces regardless of search strategy using faces from the Nimstim database (Experiment 1). By contrast, a happiness superiority effect was evident in Experiment 2 when using faces from the Ekman and Friesen database. Experiment 3 employed angry, happy, and exuberant expressions (Nimstim database) and yielded anger and happiness superiority effects, respectively, highlighting the importance of the choice of stimulus materials. Ratings of the stimulus materials collected in Experiment 3a indicate that differences in perceived emotional intensity, pleasantness, or arousal do not account for differences in search efficiency. Across three studies, the current investigation indicates that prior reports of anger or happiness superiority effects in visual search are likely to reflect on low-level visual features associated with the stimulus materials used, rather than on emotion. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved.

= 296) assessing self-reports of presence and immersion experiences. Additionally, judgments of “realness” were observed as a third presence component. A second-order factor analysis showed a distinction between presence, immersion, and interaction factors. Building on these results, a thirteen-item presence scale consisting of three independent components was developed and verified using confirmatory factor analyses across the two studies.

ABSTRACT Based on evolutionary considerations, it was hypothesized that humans have been shaped to easily spot snakes in visually cluttered scenes that might otherwise hide camouflaged snakes. This hypothesis was tested in a visual search experiment in which I assessed automatic attention capture to evolutionarily-relevant distractor stimuli (snakes), in comparison with another animal which is also feared but where this fear has a disputed evolutionary origin (spiders), and neutral stimuli (mushrooms). Sixty participants were engaged in a task that involved the detection of a target (a bird) among pictures of fruits. Unexpectedly, on some trials, a snake, a spider, or a mushroom replaced one of the fruits. The question of interest was whether the distracting stimuli slowed the reaction times for finding the target (the bird) to different degrees. Perceptual load of the task was manipulated by increments in the set size (6 or 12 items) on different trials. The findings showed that snake stimuli were processed preferentially, particularly under conditions where attentional resources were depleted, which reinforced the role of this evolutionarily-relevant stimulus in accessing the visual system (Isbell, 2009).

Using a visual search methodology we investigated the effect of feared animal stimuli on attention. Our results confirmed the important role of emotion on attention. All participants detected fear-relevant stimuli (snakes and spiders) faster than neutral (mushrooms) ones against a background of fruits. In addition, spider fearful participants were sensitized specifically to detect their feared stimulus (spiders), compared to their fear-relevant but non-feared (snakes) and neutral stimuli. However, for participants fearful of snakes there was no significant difference in detection latencies between the feared (snakes) and the fear-relevant but non-feared animal stimuli (spiders). The results from the attention task were mirrored in the emotional ratings, which showed that spider fear was highly specific, whereas snake fear was associated with a more generalized enhanced evaluation of all negative stimuli.

Snakes have provided a serious threat to primates throughout evolution. Furthermore, bites by venomous snakes still cause significant morbidity and mortality in tropical regions of the world. According to the Snake Detection Theory (SDT Isbell, 2006; 2009), the vital need to detect camouflaged snakes provided strong evolutionary pressure to develop astute perceptual capacity in animals that were potential targets for snake attacks. We performed a series of behavioral tests that assessed snake detection under conditions that may have been critical for survival. We used spiders as the control stimulus because they are also a common object of phobias and rated negatively by the general population, thus commonly lumped together with snakes as "evolutionary fear-relevant". Across four experiments (N鈥=鈥205) we demonstrate an advantage in snake detection, which was particularly obvious under visual conditions known to impede detection of a wide array of common stimuli, for example brief stimulus exposures, stimuli presentation in the visual periphery, and stimuli camouflaged in a cluttered environment. Our results demonstrate a striking independence of snake detection from ecological factors that impede the detection of other stimuli, which suggests that, consistent with the SDT, they reflect a specific biological adaptation. Nonetheless, the empirical tests we report are limited to only one aspect of this rich theory, which integrates findings across a wide array of scientific disciplines.

Spatial cuing of attentional shifts were investigated before and after the visual cue had acquired emotional significance through a classical conditioning procedure. The study consisted of three phases; an attention preconditioning phase, the conditioning phase and an attention postconditioning (extinction) phase. In the attention phases, subjects participated in a trial-by-trial cuing task, in which the location of the target was validly or invalidly cued by either a frame-lit or a completely lit rectangle. During conditioning, half the subjects (Conditioning group) had a 90 dB white noise unconditioned stimulus (UCS) presented together with one of the two attentional cues. This cue was, thus, turned into a conditioned stimulus (CS+), while the other cue became a CS-. The Control group received the noise uncontingent upon presentations of these stimuli. The Conditioning group showed greater skin conductance responses (SCRs) to the CS+ compared to the CS-, reflecting that a conditioned response was established. When the CS+ served as attentional cue, there was no difference in RTs between validly and invalidly cued targets, while responses to invalidly cued targets were delayed on all other trials. This suggests that the CS+ reduced the cognitive cost of shifting attention from the cued to the uncued location.

When information activated in memory involves emotional associations, the ability to shift attention away from an emotional cue is impaired compared to an emotionally neutral cue. The purpose of the present study was to investigate how emotional stimuli modulate attentional processes, and how this is reflected in localised brain electrical activity. Eight emotion and eight neutral words served as cues in a covert attention spatial orienting task. The cues were either valid or invalid indicators of which hemifield the target would be presented to. In the remaining trials, no cue was presented prior to the target. Twenty subjects were instructed to manually respond to the target as fast as possible. Event-related potentials (ERPs) showed an enhanced P3 component to the emotion words. The ERPs to the target showed enhanced P1 and P3 components on invalid trials, with emotional cues. There were faster reaction times (RTs) to validly cued targets, but only when the emotion words served as cues. The results demonstrated that the emotional cues elicited sustained focused attention, facilitating an engage mechanism of spatial orienting.

Abstract Gibson (1966, 1979) and Lee (1976) have described the potential usefulness of optic-flow information for the control of locomotion. One variable that might be particularly important for an animal approaching a target is time-to-collision, which Lee argues is most efficiently specified by the tau margin (the inverse of the relative rate of expansion of the target image on the retina). In humans, most empirical studies of optic flow have required perceptual judgements or have examined catching/intercepting behaviours. In animals, most studies have been strictly observational. This is particularly true for mammals, where there has been no experimental work of any kind looking at the control of locomotion. The present experiment demonstrates that the Mongolian gerbil (Meriones unguiculatus) uses time-to-collision information to control deceleration as it runs towards a target. The development of this animal model will aid investigation of the neural circuitry underlying optic flow utilization in motor control.

Abstract The present paper argues for the notion that when attention is spread across the visual field in the first sweep of information through the brain visual selection is completely stimulus-driven. Only later in time, through recurrent feedback processing, volitional control based on expectancy and goal set will bias visual selection in a top-down manner. Here we review behavioral evidence as well as evidence from ERP, fMRI, TMS and single cell recording consistent with stimulus-driven selection. Alternative viewpoints that assume a large role for top-down processing are discussed. It is argued that in most cases evidence supporting top-down control on visual selection in fact demonstrates top-down control on processes occurring later in time, following initial selection. We conclude that top-down knowledge regarding non-spatial features of the objects cannot alter the initial selection priority. Only by adjusting the size of the attentional window, the initial sweep of information through the brain may be altered in a top-down way. Copyright 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

In the current research, we sought to measure infants' physiological responses to snakes-one of the world's most widely feared stimuli-to examine whether they find snakes aversive or merely attention grabbing. Using a similar method to DeLoache and LoBue (Developmental Science, 2009, Vol. 12, pp. 201-207), 6- to 9-month-olds watched a series of multimodal (both auditory and visual) stimuli: a video of a snake (fear-relevant) or an elephant (non-fear-relevant) paired with either a fearful or happy auditory track. We measured physiological responses to the pairs of stimuli, including startle magnitude, latency to startle, and heart rate. Results suggest that snakes capture infants' attention; infants showed the fastest startle responses and lowest average heart rate to the snakes, especially when paired with a fearful voice. Unexpectedly, they also showed significantly reduced startle magnitude during this same snake video plus fearful voice combination. The results are discussed with respect to theoretical perspectives on fear acquisition.

Present conditions and selection pressures are irrelevant to the present design of organisms and do not explain how or why organisms behave adaptively, when they do. To whatever non-chance extent organisms are behaving adaptively, it is 1) because of the operation of underlying adaptations whose present design is the product of selection in the past, and 2) because present conditions resemble past conditions in those specific ways made developmentally and functionally important by the design of those adaptations. All adaptations evolved in response to the repeating elements of past environments, and their structure reflects in detail the recurrent structure of ancestral environments. Even planning mechanisms (such as onsciousness ), which supposedly deal with novel situations, depend on ancestrally shaped categorization processes and are therefore not free of the fast. In fact, the categorization of each new situation into evolutionarily repeating classes involves another kind of adaptation, the emotions, which match specialized modes of organismic operation to evolutionarily recurrent situations. The detailed statistical structure of these iterated systems of events is reflected in the detailed structure of the algorithms that govern emotional state. For this reason, the system of psychological adaptations that comprises each individual meets the present only as a version of the past.

Abstract A model for aspects of visual attention based on the concept of selective tuning is presented. It provides for a solution to the problems of selection in an image, information routing through the visual processing hierarchy and task-specific attentional bias. The central thesis is that attention acts to optimize the search procedure inherent in a solution to vision. It does so by selectively tuning the visual processing network which is accomplished by a top-down hierarchy of winner-take-all processes embedded within the visual processing pyramid. Comparisons to other major computational models of attention and to the relevant neurobiology are included in detail throughout the paper. The model has been implemented; several examples of its performance are shown. This model is a hypothesis for primate visual attention, but it also outperforms existing computational solutions for attention in machine vision and is highly appropriate to solving the problem in a robot vision system.

Attention bias modification (ABM) programs have been considered as a promising new approach for the treatment of various disorders, including social anxiety disorder (SAD). However, previous studies yielded ambiguous results regarding the efficacy of ABM in SAD. The present proof-of-concept study investigates the feasibility of a newly developed virtual reality (VR)-based dot-probe training paradigm. It was designed to facilitate attentional disengagement from threatening stimuli in socially anxious individuals (N=鈥15). The following outcomes were examined: (a) self-reports of enjoyment, motivation, flow, and presence; (b) attentional bias for social stimuli; and (c) social anxiety symptoms. Results showed that ABM training is associated with high scores in enjoyment, motivation, flow, and presence. Furthermore, significant improvements in terms of attention bias and social anxiety symptoms were observed from pre- to follow-up assessment. The study suggests that VR is a feasible and presumably a promising new medium for ABM trainings. Controlled studies will need to be carried out.

Snakes and their relationships with humans and other primates have attracted broad attention from multiple fields of study, but not, surprisingly, from neuroscience, despite the involvement of the visual system and strong behavioral and physiological evidence that humans and other primates can detect snakes faster than innocuous objects. Here, we report the existence of neurons in the primate medial and dorsolateral pulvinar that respond selectively to visual images of snakes. Compared with three other categories of stimuli (monkey faces, monkey hands, and geometrical shapes), snakes elicited the strongest, fastest responses, and the responses were not reduced by low spatial filtering. These findings integrate neuroscience with evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, herpetology, and primatology by identifying a neurobiological basis for primates' heightened visual sensitivity to snakes, and adding a crucial component to the growing evolutionary perspective that snakes have long shaped our primate lineage.

Abstract High and low spatial frequency information in visual images is processed by distinct neural channels. Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in humans, we show dissociable roles of such visual channels for processing faces and emotional fearful expressions. Neural responses in fusiform cortex, and effects of repeating the same face identity upon fusiform activity, were greater with intact or high-spatial-frequency face stimuli than with low-frequency faces, regardless of emotional expression. In contrast, amygdala responses to fearful expressions were greater for intact or low-frequency faces than for high-frequency faces. An activation of pulvinar and superior colliculus by fearful expressions occurred specifically with low-frequency faces, suggesting that these subcortical pathways may provide coarse fear-related inputs to the amygdala.

This review considers evidence from cognitive experimental investigations of attentional processing of emotional information. The review contrasts findings from the general population with those from populations selected for clinical disorder or vulnerability to it. Concepts critical for appreciation of this literature are presented and major cognitive theories are summarised, evaluated and compared. Empirical data are organised by type of attentional function, covering filtering (dichotic listening, emotional Stroop), search (visual search), cuing (attentional probe, spatial cuing) and multiple task (RSVP) paradigms. Conclusions are that, consistent with current models, differences in an “evaluative system” appear to lie at the heart of the phenomena reviewed and attentional biases to emotional material reflect the responsiveness of this system. If so, desensitising its over-reactivity would be the best approach to ameliorating the negative consequences of attentional biases in psychopathology. To do so requires greater understanding of how and on what basis the “evaluation” is conducted. A possible way forward is suggested.

对威胁刺激的注意偏向普遍存在。注意定向加速和注意解除困难在不同阶段对注意偏向产生影响。威胁刺激属性、呈现时间以及被试特征是重要的调节因素。以杏仁核为核心的杏仁核?前扣带回网络可能是注意定向加速的神经基础,而以眶额叶为中心的前额叶皮层可能是注意解除的神经基础。未来还需要就注意定向加速与注意解除困难的关系、注意偏向的调节机制以及其神经基础做更深入的研究。