Exploring the mechanisms that support attentional bias modification
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1
Victoria University of Wellington, School of Psychology, New Zealand
Anxious people show an exaggerated attentional bias toward threat. Attentional bias modification (ABM) is a promising therapeutic technique that trains attention toward neutral or positive information, and has been shown to effectively reduce anxious systems. However, despite a large literature on the clinical outcomes of ABM, it is still unclear how ABM achieves its effects. On the one hand, training could reverse an early threat bias in attentional selection - essentially biasing competition toward the neutral stimulus. Alternatively, training could strengthen top-down executive processes that control the allocation of attention. We tested the hypothesis that training alters the target of attentional selection. In Experiment 1, healthy participants completed a modified dot-probe task in which they saw two faces - one angry and one neutral - for 500 ms, followed by a target that appeared more often in the location of either the angry or neutral face (depending on their respective training condition). Response times showed that an attentional bias was established toward the trained target. In Experiment 2, we recorded EEG during the training procedure, and examined the effect of training on the N2pc as an index of attentional selection. As expected, participants showed an N2pc to the angry face before training, indicative of a selection bias for threat. However, the N2pc did not change during training, even though behavioural measures showed that training affected the allocation of attention. These results suggest that ABM does not alter attentional selection of threat. Rather, it is likely that ABM strengthens executive control processes that are important for disengaging from threats after they have been selected.
Keywords:
Anxiety,
Attention,
emotion,
ERP,
N2pc
Conference:
XII International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON-XII), Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, 27 Jul - 31 Jul, 2014.
Presentation Type:
Poster
Topic:
Attention
Citation:
Grimshaw
G and
Hunkin
L
(2015). Exploring the mechanisms that support attentional bias modification.
Conference Abstract:
XII International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON-XII).
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2015.217.00170
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Received:
19 Feb 2015;
Published Online:
24 Apr 2015.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Gina Grimshaw, Victoria University of Wellington, School of Psychology, Wellington, New Zealand, gina.grimshaw@vuw.ac.nz