Improving the Measurement of Anxiety-Linked Attentional Bias - A Pilot Study Investigating the Bias for Novel Stimuli

Attentional biases seem to perpetuate social anxiety by locking focus onto threat-related information. The classical dot-probe task has been the golden standard of measuring selective attention based on variations in reaction times (RT) due to bottom-up saliency. In recent decades, concerns have grown over this task's reliability, partly due to statistical concerns over its indexing method and because it fails to account for top-down behavioral strategies that circumvent bottom-up attentional capture. This pilot study tested the novel Parallel Target Attention Task (PATAT) assessing attentional biases towards novel stimuli, as it aims to overcome these shortcomings. The task measured participant’s responses to two target stimuli presented in proximity to a familiar and a novel stimulus. An attentional bias was then calculated as a straightforward sum of participant responses to novel stimuli. By contrasting images of faces and natural scenes, we examined whether a bias for novelty...Show moreAttentional biases seem to perpetuate social anxiety by locking focus onto threat-related information. The classical dot-probe task has been the golden standard of measuring selective attention based on variations in reaction times (RT) due to bottom-up saliency. In recent decades, concerns have grown over this task's reliability, partly due to statistical concerns over its indexing method and because it fails to account for top-down behavioral strategies that circumvent bottom-up attentional capture. This pilot study tested the novel Parallel Target Attention Task (PATAT) assessing attentional biases towards novel stimuli, as it aims to overcome these shortcomings. The task measured participant’s responses to two target stimuli presented in proximity to a familiar and a novel stimulus. An attentional bias was then calculated as a straightforward sum of participant responses to novel stimuli. By contrasting images of faces and natural scenes, we examined whether a bias for novelty is category specific. Last but not least, we investigated whether people who display higher levels of Behavioral Inhibition (BI), pay more attention to novel stimuli. The task was able to measure an attention bias toward novelty in the majority of participants but fell short on replicating a category-dependent bias. Also, contrary to our hypothesis that novel stimuli elicit more bottom-up attentional capture in such participants, data showed the opposite trend, consistent with the observation that such individuals generally avoid novel experiences. Theoretical and methodological implications of the results are discussed.Show less

Leiden University Student Repository

Documents

In Collections

Improving the Measurement of Anxiety-Linked Attentional Bias - A Pilot Study Investigating the Bias for Novel Stimuli