Fear not! Anxiety biases attentional enhancement of threat without impairing working memory filtering
- PDF / 1,037,853 Bytes
- 13 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 40 Downloads / 183 Views
Fear not! Anxiety biases attentional enhancement of threat without impairing working memory filtering Christine Salahub 1
&
Stephen M. Emrich 1
Accepted: 5 September 2020 # The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract Individuals with anxiety have attentional biases toward threat-related distractors. This deficit in attentional control has been shown to impact visual working memory (VWM) filtering efficiency, as anxious individuals inappropriately store threatening distractors in VWM. It remains unclear, however, whether this mis-allocation of memory resources is due to inappropriate attentional enhancement of threatening distractors, or to a failure in suppression. Here, we used a systematically lateralized VWM task with fearful and neutral faces to examine event-related potentials related to attentional selection (N2pc), suppression (PD), and working memory maintenance (CDA). We found that state anxiety correlated with attentional enhancement of threatrelated distractors, such that more anxious individuals had larger N2pc amplitudes toward fearful distractors than neutral distractors. However, there was no correlation between anxiety and memory storage of fearful distractors (CDA). These findings demonstrate that anxiety biases attention toward fearful distractors, but that this bias does not always guarantee increased memory storage of threat-related distractors. Keywords Attention . Working memory . Cognitive control . ERP . Anxiety
Introduction Humans are wired to attend to and identify threat, such as a potentially dangerous snake in the grass (Öhman et al., 2001; Öhman & Mineka, 2001). Even when these threatening stimuli are task-irrelevant, they manage to capture attention, suggesting that threat detection is a relatively automatic process (Beck & Clark, 1997; Hodsoll et al., 2011; Mogg & Bradley, 1999; but see, Pessoa, 2005). Although it is important to notice these dangers, threat-detection can become disadvantageous if taskirrelevant information cannot be ignored in favor of taskrelevant information. This is especially true for individuals with anxiety disorders, who are more likely to attend to threatening stimuli, delay disengagement from those stimuli, and to Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-020-00831-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Christine Salahub [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Brock University, 1812 Sir Isaac Brock Way, St. Catharines, Ontario L2S 3A1, Canada
interpret ambiguous information as threatening (Bishop, 2007; Fox et al., 2001; Mathews & Mackintosh, 1998). Even for individuals with subclinical levels of anxiety, there is a threat-related attentional bias toward irrelevant information (Bar-Haim et al., 2007; Stout et al., 2013), implicating general prefrontal attentional control deficits across a range of anxiety levels, and not just for individuals who are clinically diagnosed (Bishop, 2009; Bishop, Duncan, Brett, & Lawrence, 2004a). Although it
Data Loading...
