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Measuring Biases of Visual Attention: A Comparison of Four Tasks

Attention biases to stimuli with emotional content may play a role in the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders. The most commonly used tasks in measuring and treating such biases, the dot-probe and spatial cueing tasks, have yielded mixed results, however. We assessed the sensitivity of...

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Autores principales: Sigurjónsdóttir, Ólafía, Bjornsson, Andri S., Wessmann, Inga D., Kristjánsson, Árni
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7016897/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31935867
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/bs10010028
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author Sigurjónsdóttir, Ólafía
Bjornsson, Andri S.
Wessmann, Inga D.
Kristjánsson, Árni
author_facet Sigurjónsdóttir, Ólafía
Bjornsson, Andri S.
Wessmann, Inga D.
Kristjánsson, Árni
author_sort Sigurjónsdóttir, Ólafía
collection PubMed
description Attention biases to stimuli with emotional content may play a role in the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders. The most commonly used tasks in measuring and treating such biases, the dot-probe and spatial cueing tasks, have yielded mixed results, however. We assessed the sensitivity of four visual attention tasks (dot-probe, spatial cueing, visual search with irrelevant distractor and attentional blink tasks) to differences in attentional processing between threatening and neutral faces in 33 outpatients with a primary diagnosis of social anxiety disorder (SAD) and 26 healthy controls. The dot-probe and cueing tasks revealed no differential processing of neutral and threatening faces between the SAD and control groups. The irrelevant distractor task showed some sensitivity to differential processing for the SAD group, but the attentional blink task was uniquely sensitive to such differences in both groups, and revealed processing differences between the SAD and control groups. The attentional blink task also revealed interesting temporal dynamics of attentional processing of emotional stimuli and may provide a uniquely nuanced picture of attentional response to emotional stimuli. Our results therefore suggest that the attentional blink task is more suitable for measuring preferential attending to emotional stimuli and treating dysfunctional attention patterns than the more commonly used dot-probe and cueing tasks.
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spelling pubmed-70168972020-02-28 Measuring Biases of Visual Attention: A Comparison of Four Tasks Sigurjónsdóttir, Ólafía Bjornsson, Andri S. Wessmann, Inga D. Kristjánsson, Árni Behav Sci (Basel) Article Attention biases to stimuli with emotional content may play a role in the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders. The most commonly used tasks in measuring and treating such biases, the dot-probe and spatial cueing tasks, have yielded mixed results, however. We assessed the sensitivity of four visual attention tasks (dot-probe, spatial cueing, visual search with irrelevant distractor and attentional blink tasks) to differences in attentional processing between threatening and neutral faces in 33 outpatients with a primary diagnosis of social anxiety disorder (SAD) and 26 healthy controls. The dot-probe and cueing tasks revealed no differential processing of neutral and threatening faces between the SAD and control groups. The irrelevant distractor task showed some sensitivity to differential processing for the SAD group, but the attentional blink task was uniquely sensitive to such differences in both groups, and revealed processing differences between the SAD and control groups. The attentional blink task also revealed interesting temporal dynamics of attentional processing of emotional stimuli and may provide a uniquely nuanced picture of attentional response to emotional stimuli. Our results therefore suggest that the attentional blink task is more suitable for measuring preferential attending to emotional stimuli and treating dysfunctional attention patterns than the more commonly used dot-probe and cueing tasks. MDPI 2020-01-06 /pmc/articles/PMC7016897/ /pubmed/31935867 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/bs10010028 Text en © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Sigurjónsdóttir, Ólafía
Bjornsson, Andri S.
Wessmann, Inga D.
Kristjánsson, Árni
Measuring Biases of Visual Attention: A Comparison of Four Tasks
title Measuring Biases of Visual Attention: A Comparison of Four Tasks
title_full Measuring Biases of Visual Attention: A Comparison of Four Tasks
title_fullStr Measuring Biases of Visual Attention: A Comparison of Four Tasks
title_full_unstemmed Measuring Biases of Visual Attention: A Comparison of Four Tasks
title_short Measuring Biases of Visual Attention: A Comparison of Four Tasks
title_sort measuring biases of visual attention: a comparison of four tasks
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7016897/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31935867
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/bs10010028
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