Bechi Gabrielli Giulia, Rossi-Arnaud Clelia, Spataro Pietro, Doricchi Fabrizio, Costanzi Marco, Santirocchi Alessandro, Angeletti Gloria, Sani Gabriele, Cestari Vincenzo
Department of Psychology, Faculty of Medicine and Psychology, Sapienza University, 00185 Rome, Italy.
Faculty of Economics, Universitas Mercatorum, 00100 Rome, Italy.
J Pers Med. 2021 Mar 6;11(3):185. doi: 10.3390/jpm11030185.
In the Attentional Boost Effect (ABE), stimuli encoded with to-be-responded targets are later recognized more accurately than stimuli encoded with to-be-ignored distractors. While this effect is robust in young adults, evidence regarding healthy older adults and clinical populations is sparse. The present study investigated whether a significant ABE is present in bipolar patients (BP), who, even in the euthymic phase, suffer from attentional deficits, and whether the effect is modulated by age. Young and adult euthymic BP and healthy controls (HC) presented with a sequence of pictures paired with target or distractor squares were asked to pay attention to the pictures and press the spacebar when a target square appeared. After a 15-min interval, their memory of the pictures was tested in a recognition task. The performance in the detection task was lower in BP than in HC, in both age groups. More importantly, neither young nor adult BP exhibited a significant ABE; for HC, a robust ABE was only found in young participants. The results suggest that the increase in the attentional demands of the detection task in BP and in adult HC draws resources away from the encoding of target-associated stimuli, resulting in elimination of the ABE. Clinical implications are discussed.
在注意增强效应（ABE）中，与待响应目标一起编码的刺激，相较于与待忽略干扰物一起编码的刺激，之后能被更准确地识别。虽然这种效应在年轻人中很显著，但关于健康老年人和临床人群的证据却很少。本研究调查了双相情感障碍患者（BP）中是否存在显著的ABE（即使在心境正常阶段，双相情感障碍患者也存在注意力缺陷），以及该效应是否受年龄调节。让年轻和成年心境正常的双相情感障碍患者以及健康对照组（HC）观看一系列与目标或干扰方块配对的图片，并要求他们留意图片，当目标方块出现时按下空格键。间隔15分钟后，通过识别任务测试他们对图片的记忆。在两个年龄组中，双相情感障碍患者在检测任务中的表现均低于健康对照组。更重要的是，无论是年轻还是成年双相情感障碍患者都未表现出显著的ABE；对于健康对照组，仅在年轻参与者中发现了显著的ABE。结果表明，双相情感障碍患者和成年健康对照组在检测任务中注意力需求的增加，使资源从与目标相关刺激的编码中转移，从而导致ABE消失。本文还讨论了其临床意义。
