Nick Berggren

Attentional control deficits in trait anxiety: why you see them and why you don't.

Attentional Control Theory (ACT; Eysenck et al., 2007; Derakshan and Eysenck, 2009) posits that trait anxiety interferes with the inhibition, shifting and updating processes of working memory. Consequently, high anxious individuals are predicted to perform worse on cognitively demanding tasks requiring efficient cognitive processing. Whilst a growing number of studies have provided support for this view, the possible underlying mechanisms of this deficiency are far less understood. In particular, there is conflicting neuroscientific evidence with some work showing associations between anxiety and increased neural activity over frontal areas, while others report reduced activity. We review recent evidence that has helped elucidate the cognitive hallmarks of trait anxiety, and suggest how previous discrepancies can be accommodated within ACTs prediction that reduced cognitive efficiency may be ameliorated by strategies such as compensatory effort. Finally, we discuss if ACTs distinction on efficiency and effectiveness can be applied to threat-related processing, often shown to additively override attentional control in anxiety.

Affective attention under cognitive load: reduced emotional biases but emergent anxiety-related costs to inhibitory control

Trait anxiety is associated with deficits in attentional control, particularly in the ability to inhibit prepotent responses. Here, we investigated this effect while varying the level of cognitive load in a modified antisaccade task that employed emotional facial expressions (neutral, happy, and angry) as targets. Load was manipulated using a secondary auditory task requiring recognition of tones (low load), or recognition of specific tone pitch (high load). Results showed that load increased antisaccade latencies on trials where gaze toward face stimuli should be inhibited. This effect was exacerbated for high anxious individuals. Emotional expression also modulated task performance on antisaccade trials for both high and low anxious participants under low cognitive load, but did not influence performance under high load. Collectively, results (1) suggest that individuals reporting high levels of anxiety are particularly vulnerable to the effects of cognitive load on inhibition, and (2) support recent evidence that loading cognitive processes can reduce emotional influences on attention and cognition.

The effect of cognitive load in emotional attention and trait anxiety: An eye movement study

There is extensive debate on the automaticity of attentional processing of emotional information. One core feature of automaticity is the independence of processing emotion from factors that can affect attention such as cognitive load. In the present study we investigated whether processing of emotional facial expressions was dependent on cognitive load using a visual search paradigm. Manual responses as well as eye movements were recorded. Although both measures showed that emotional information captured attention more strongly than neutral information, manual responses indicated that load slowed reaction times only for “pop-out” emotion conditions; no increase was seen for all-emotional displays. This suggests that the saliency of emotion was reduced, but eye movement data showed that effects were caused by improvements for all-emotional displays in target processing efficiency. Additionally, trait anxiety did not influence threat processing, but costs were observed under load that were not present for nonanxious subjects. Our results suggest that while load can interfere with task performance, it may not affect emotion processing. Our findings highlight the importance of eye movement measures in accounting for differences in manual response data and provide novel support to theories of anxiety.

The effects of self-report cognitive failures and cognitive load on antisaccade performance

Individuals reporting high levels of distractibility in everyday life show impaired performance in standard laboratory tasks measuring selective attention and inhibitory processes. Similarly, increasing cognitive load leads to more errors/distraction in a variety of cognitive tasks. How these two factors interact is currently unclear; highly distractible individuals may be affected more when their cognitive resources are taxed, or load may linearly affect performance for all individuals. We investigated the relationship between self-reported levels of cognitive failures (CF) in daily life and performance in the antisaccade task, a widely used tool examining attentional control. Levels of concurrent cognitive demand were manipulated using a secondary auditory discrimination task. We found that both levels of self-reported CF and task load increased antisaccade latencies while having no effect on prosaccade eye-movements. However individuals rating themselves as suffering few daily life distractions showed a comparable load cost to those who experience many. These findings suggest that the likelihood of distraction is governed by the addition of both internal susceptibility and the external current load placed on working memory.

Inhibitory deficits in trait anxiety: Increased stimulus-based or response-based interference?

Trait anxiety is associated with an impaired ability to inhibit task-irrelevant distractions. However, distractions may cause conflict at multiple stages within the information-processing stream, which may be resolved by different subsystems, depending on the type of conflict. Here, we contrasted two forms of conflict that have been distinguished in the literature: stimulus–stimulus (SS) versus stimulus–response (SR) competition. Across two experiments, participants completed a Stroop-like task that included distractor color words that could be either a different color promoting the same response as the target (SS interference) or a different color promoting a different response (SR interference). In line with previous studies, anxiety increased overall task-irrelevant distraction, measured by incongruent versus congruent reaction times. Importantly, this increase was driven solely by SR conflict, with no evidence of group differences in SS interference, despite clear within-subjects costs. These results clarify that trait anxiety may modulate inhibitory responses primarily by disrupting the resolution of response competition, while having little effect on stimulus conflict. Additionally, the results highlight the utility of distinguishing forms of conflict resolution, particularly in individual-difference approaches in which inhibition is impaired in a variety of clinical and nonclinical populations.

Does contralateral delay activity reflect working memory storage or the current focus of spatial attention within visual working memory

During the retention of visual information in working memory, event-related brain potentials show a sustained negativity over posterior visual regions contralateral to the side where memorized stimuli were presented. This contralateral delay activity (CDA) is generally believed to be a neural marker of working memory storage. In two experiments, we contrasted this storage account of the CDA with the alternative hypothesis that the CDA reflects the current focus of spatial attention on a subset of memorized items set up during the most recent encoding episode. We employed a sequential loading procedure where participants memorized four task-relevant items that were presented in two successive memory displays (M1 and M2). In both experiments, CDA components were initially elicited contralateral to task-relevant items in M1. Critically, the CDA switched polarity when M2 displays appeared on the opposite side. In line with the attentional activation account, these reversed CDA components exclusively reflected the number of items that were encoded from M2 displays, irrespective of how many M1 items were already held in working memory. On trials where M1 and M2 displays were presented on the same side and on trials where M2 displays appeared nonlaterally, CDA components elicited in the interval after M2 remained sensitive to a residual trace of M1 items, indicating that some activation of previously stored items was maintained across encoding episodes. These results challenge the hypothesis that CDA amplitudes directly reflect the total number of stored objects and suggest that the CDA is primarily sensitive to the activation of a subset of working memory representations within the current focus of spatial attention.

The role of consciousness in attentional control differences in trait anxiety

Trait anxiety has long been associated with impaired selective attention to task-irrelevant threat stimuli, both when threat is presented consciously and outside of awareness. However recent research has suggested broader deficits in selective attention, with poorer ability to ignore supraliminal non-emotional information in anxiety. Here, we investigated whether anxiety could equally be associated with poorer selective attention for non-emotional stimuli in a subliminal context. Participants performed a simple arrow discrimination task, where prior incompatible or compatible response primes were presented before targets either unmasked (supraliminal) or masked (subliminal). While distractor interference was evident in both conditions, trait anxiety was associated with increased task-irrelevant processing only in the supraliminal condition; group effects were eliminated when primes were masked. Our findings are in line with traditional accounts suggesting that differences in selective attention and cognitive control solely modulate conscious distractor processing.

The guidance of spatial attention during visual search for color combinations and color configurations.

Representations of target-defining features (attentional templates) guide the selection of target objects in visual search. We used behavioral and electrophysiological measures to investigate how such search templates control the allocation of attention in search tasks where targets are defined by the combination of 2 colors or by a specific spatial configuration of these colors. Target displays were preceded by spatially uninformative cue displays that contained items in 1 or both target-defining colors. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that, during search for color combinations, attention is initially allocated independently and in parallel to all objects with target-matching colors, but is then rapidly withdrawn from objects that only have 1 of the 2 target colors. In Experiment 3, targets were defined by a particular spatial configuration of 2 colors, and could be accompanied by nontarget objects with a different configuration of the same colors. Attentional guidance processes were unable to distinguish between these 2 types of objects. Both attracted attention equally when they appeared in a cue display, and both received parallel focal-attentional processing and were encoded into working memory when they were presented in the same target display. Results demonstrate that attention can be guided simultaneously by multiple features from the same dimension, but that these guidance processes have no access to the spatial-configural properties of target objects. They suggest that attentional templates do not represent target objects in an integrated pictorial fashion, but contain separate representations of target-defining features. (PsycINFO Database Record

Trait anxiety reduces implicit expectancy during target spatial probability cueing

Trait anxiety is associated with selective attentional biases to threat but also with more general impairments in attentional control, primarily supported in tasks involving distractor inhibition. Here, we investigated the novel prediction that anxiety should modulate expectation formation in response to task contingencies. Participants completed a visual search task, where briefly presented color cues predicted subsequent target spatial location on the majority of trials. Responses made in the absence of conscious awareness of cue-target contingency resulted in significantly faster RTs for cue-valid versus invalid trials, but only for low anxious participants; high anxiety eliminated evidence of cueing. This finding suggests that impairments to attentional control in anxiety also affect subtle rule-based learning and predictive coding of expectation. We discuss whether a lack of prediction in anxious behavior may reflect known deficits in attentional control, or may form part of a strategy to promote effective threat detection.

The spatially global control of attentional target selection in visual search

ABSTRACT Glyn Humphreys and his co-workers have made numerous important theoretical and empirical contributions to research on visual search. They have introduced the concept of attentional target templates and investigated the nature of these templates and how they are involved in the control of search performance. In the experiments reported here, we investigated whether feature-specific search templates for particular colours can guide target selection independently for different regions of visual space. We employed behavioural and electrophysiological markers of attentional selection in tasks with targets defined by specific colour/location combinations. In Experiment 1, participants searched for pairs of colour targets in a particular spatial configuration (e.g., red in the upper and blue in the lower visual field). In Experiment 2, they searched for single colour-defined targets at specific locations (e.g., red on the left or blue on the right). Target displays were preceded by non-informative cues containing target-colour items at task-set matching or mismatching locations. Contingent attentional capture was observed only for matching cues. However, both matching and mismatching cues elicited identical N2pc components, indicating equivalent attentional capture. This shows that the rapid deployment of attention towards target features is spatially non-selective, and that selection of colour/location combinations occurs at later post-perceptual stages. This was further corroborated in search displays where targets were accompanied by target-colour distractors at nonmatching locations. Here, spatial biases towards the target emerged late and were strongly attenuated relative to displays without such distractors. These results demonstrate that attentional templates for target-defining features operate in a spatially-global fashion. Feature-based guidance of visual search cannot be restricted to particular locations even when this is required by the demands of an attentional selection task.