Texas A&M Institute for Neuroscience, Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA.
Exp Psychol. 2021 May;68(3):165-172. doi: 10.1027/1618-3169/a000521.
Studies on attentional bias have overwhelmingly focused on the priority of different stimuli and have rarely manipulated the state of the observer. Recently, the threat of unpredictable shock has been utilized to experimentally induce anxiety and investigate how negative arousal modulates attentional control. Experimentally induced anxiety has been shown to reduce the attentional priority afforded to reward-related stimuli while enhancing the efficiency of goal-directed attentional control. It is unclear which of these two influences might dominate when attending to reward-related stimuli is consistent with task goals and by extension what the scope of the modulatory influence of threat on attention is. In contrast to paradigms in the visual domain, a novel auditory identification task has demonstrated a robust influence of target-value associations on selective attention. In the present study, we examined how the threat of shock modulates the influence of learned value on voluntary attention. In both threat and no-threat conditions, we replicate prior findings of voluntary prioritization of reward-associated sounds. However, unlike in studies measuring involuntary attentional capture, threat did not modulate the influence of reward on attention. Our findings highlight important limitations to when and how threat modulates the control of attention, contextualizing prior findings.
注意力偏向的研究主要集中在不同刺激的优先级上，很少操纵观察者的状态。最近，不可预测的冲击威胁被用来实验性地诱发焦虑，并研究负面唤醒如何调节注意力控制。实验性诱发的焦虑已被证明会降低与奖励相关刺激的注意力优先级，同时提高目标导向注意力控制的效率。当关注与任务目标一致的奖励相关刺激时，这两种影响哪个占主导地位，以及威胁对注意力的调节影响范围有多大，尚不清楚。与视觉领域的范式不同，一项新的听觉识别任务证明了目标值关联对选择性注意力的强大影响。在本研究中，我们研究了冲击威胁如何调节学习价值对自愿注意力的影响。在威胁和无威胁条件下，我们复制了先前关于奖励相关声音的自愿优先化的发现。然而，与测量非自愿注意力捕捉的研究不同，威胁并没有调节奖励对注意力的影响。我们的研究结果突出了威胁调节注意力控制的时间和方式的重要限制，为先前的发现提供了背景。
