Scientific research seldom focuses on naturalistic approaches of investigating selective attention in sensory modalities, even though being able to selectively pay attention to a stimulus is...Show moreScientific research seldom focuses on naturalistic approaches of investigating selective attention in sensory modalities, even though being able to selectively pay attention to a stimulus is important in real life. The current cross-modal ERP study illustrates the importance of addressing naturalistic environments and tasks in behavioral and ERP research regarding auditory selective attention and cognitive load. Instead of using a standardized cognitive load task, smartphone interactions were used to indicate whether or not someone was engaged in the visual and tactile modality. During the task, a sound with a duration of 50 msec and an interstimulus interval (ISI) of one to three seconds was administered to the participants (n = 14). Following the ideas of load theory, we hypothesized that in the “during smartphone use” condition, there will be a larger N1 peak than in the “while not using the smartphone” condition. There were no significant larger N1 peaks in the “during smartphone use” condition compared to the “while not using the smartphone” condition. A possible explanation for this lack of N1 amplitude modulation could be the difference between the usual unnatural study settings in behavioral and ERP research, where load induced alterations are prevalent, and the naturalistic context of the current study. For future research it would be interesting to investigate cognitive load and selective attention cross-modally in a nonlaboratory setting, with tasks that have been validated to induce cognitive load.Show less
Social anxiety disorder (SAD) can be a crippling disorder characterized by strong avoidance of social situations and encounters due to fear of judgment from others, leading to various social and...Show moreSocial anxiety disorder (SAD) can be a crippling disorder characterized by strong avoidance of social situations and encounters due to fear of judgment from others, leading to various social and interpersonal problems. Socially anxious individuals (SAI) often have cognitive biases that influence how they perceive social feedback from others and can perpetuate the disorder. How SAI learn from social feedback is important, as this can determine their self-view. The goal of this study is to investigate the influence of a specific cognitive bias in attention in socially anxious individuals (SAI) on social feedback learning. This study was conducted using a modified social judgment paradigm, designed to expose participants to positive and negative social feedback from 4 fictitious peers, who vary in their percentage of positive feedback. Participants will learn which peer gives the most and least feedback throughout the task. This will be conducted and measured using Electroencephalography (EEG). The results showed that SAI tend to orient their attention towards unexpected social feedback, regardless of valence. As well as this, SAIs tend to learn less from unexpected negative social feedback compared to lower SAI. Even though SAI payed more attention to unexpected social feedback, we propose that there might be an avoidance coping mechanism which influences the SAI to learn less from the unexpected negative social feedback.Show less
