Cognitive and Affective Psychophysiology Laboratory, Department of Experimental Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, Herni Dunantlaan 2, Ghent, 9000, Belgium.
Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
Psychol Res. 2024 Nov 12;89(1):3. doi: 10.1007/s00426-024-02028-6.
Hypervigilance involves increased attentional scanning of the environment to facilitate the detection of possible threats. Accordingly, this state is mostly bound to external attention and as a corollary, it might be detrimental to internal attention and further affect attentional balance defined as the ability to switch dynamically between these two domains. In the current study, we aimed to address this question and induced hypervigilance in 49 healthy participants through the presentation of a task-unrelated aversive sound while they performed the switching attention task (SAT), which was previously devised to study attentional balance. The skin conductance response results, as well as subjective sound ratings, confirmed that the hypervigilance manipulation was successful. At the behavioral level, hypervigilance led to a more symmetrical balance between internal and external attention compared to the control and neutral conditions, where it was asymmetrical, replicating previous studies. Moreover, using a drift diffusion model, we found that hypervigilance reduced the drift rate for internal repetition trials, suggesting that hypervigilance possibly caused an impaired shielding of internal attention.
过度警觉涉及增加对环境的注意力扫描，以促进对可能威胁的检测。因此，这种状态主要与外部注意力有关，因此可能不利于内部注意力，并进一步影响注意力平衡，定义为在这两个领域之间动态切换的能力。在目前的研究中，我们旨在解决这个问题，并通过在 49 名健康参与者执行切换注意任务（SAT）时呈现与任务无关的厌恶声音来诱导过度警觉，SAT 是先前设计来研究注意力平衡的任务。皮肤电反应结果以及主观声音评分证实了过度警觉的操作是成功的。在行为水平上，与对照和中性条件相比，过度警觉导致内部和外部注意力之间更对称的平衡，在这些条件下，注意力不平衡，这与以前的研究结果一致。此外，使用漂移扩散模型，我们发现过度警觉降低了内部重复试验的漂移率，这表明过度警觉可能导致对内注意的屏蔽受损。
