Soares Sandra C, Esteves Francisco, Flykt Anders
Karolinska Institute, Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Section of Psychology, Stockholm, Sweden.
J Anxiety Disord. 2009 Jan;23(1):136-44. doi: 10.1016/j.janxdis.2008.05.002. Epub 2008 May 13.
The research aimed at examining attentional selectivity in a visual search paradigm using pictures of animals that have provided a recurrent threat in an evolutionary perspective (i.e., snakes and spiders) and pictures of animals that have supposedly posed no such threat (i.e., cats and fish). Experiment 1 showed no advantage of fear-relevant stimuli over non-fear-relevant animal stimuli. However, an attentional capture seemed to emerge as a delay in the disengagement of attention, specifically when there was a massive presentation of fear-relevant stimuli in the array. The results from Experiment 2, where participants were selected based specifically on their fear of either snakes or spiders (but not both), showed a preferential processing of the congruent feared stimulus, when compared with non-fearful participants, which strengthens the notion that fear significance may be an important factor drawing attention to a particular spatial location.
该研究旨在使用从进化角度来看一直构成威胁的动物图片（即蛇和蜘蛛）以及据推测不构成此类威胁的动物图片（即猫和鱼），在视觉搜索范式中检验注意力选择性。实验1表明，与非恐惧相关的动物刺激相比，恐惧相关刺激并无优势。然而，注意力捕捉似乎表现为注意力脱离的延迟，特别是当阵列中大量呈现恐惧相关刺激时。实验2的结果显示，与不恐惧的参与者相比，专门根据对蛇或蜘蛛（但不是两者）的恐惧来挑选参与者时，会优先处理与之相符的恐惧刺激，这强化了恐惧显著性可能是将注意力吸引到特定空间位置的一个重要因素这一观点。
