Department of Education and Psychology, The Open University of Israel, Ra'anana, Israel.
Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2020 May;73(5):676-687. doi: 10.1177/1747021820905735. Epub 2020 Feb 19.
Ample research has suggested that visual attention is biased towards threat and it was argued that this bias is an essential component of survival and implicated in anxiety. However, it is less clear how this bias is translated into memory, and specifically into the memory of items presented near a threatening stimulus. Here, we investigated this issue by testing how well people remember neutral and threatening images presented under various task demands. On each trial, observers saw two images before performing a dot-probe task (Experiment 1), a colour discrimination task (Experiment 2), a global or local attention task (Experiment 3), or no task at all (Experiment 4). A recognition memory test was performed at the end of each experiment to assess how the presence of a threatening image influences the memory of both images presented in the display. In all experiments, overall memory was enhanced as more threatening images were presented in the display. However, this enhancement did not occur at the expense of the processing of the surroundings. That is, with the exception of the dot-probe task, memory performance was not affected by an adjacent threatening image. Together, these findings challenge trade-off accounts, which predict that the processing of a threatening stimulus should take place at the expense of the processing of nearby items. Instead, these findings suggest that any effect of threat on the visual processing of the display is short-lived and more limited than previously thought.
大量研究表明，视觉注意力偏向于威胁，有人认为这种偏见是生存的重要组成部分，与焦虑有关。然而，这种偏见如何转化为记忆，特别是转化为与威胁刺激物附近呈现的项目的记忆，还不太清楚。在这里，我们通过测试人们在各种任务需求下记住中性和威胁图像的能力来研究这个问题。在每次试验中，观察者在执行点探测任务（实验 1）、颜色辨别任务（实验 2）、全局或局部注意任务（实验 3）或根本不执行任务（实验 4）之前，先看到两个图像。在每个实验结束时进行识别记忆测试，以评估在显示中呈现威胁图像会如何影响对显示中呈现的两个图像的记忆。在所有实验中，随着显示中呈现的威胁图像数量的增加，整体记忆得到增强。然而，这种增强并没有以牺牲周围环境的处理为代价。也就是说，除了点探测任务外，记忆表现不受相邻威胁图像的影响。这些发现共同挑战了权衡理论，该理论预测威胁刺激的处理应该以牺牲附近项目的处理为代价。相反，这些发现表明，威胁对显示的视觉处理的任何影响都是短暂的，比之前认为的更为有限。
