Limited generalisation of changes in attentional bias following attentional bias modification with the visual probe task

ABSTRACT

Although attentional bias modification (ABM) can change anxiety, recent studies failed to replicate such effects, possibly because the visual probe ABM failed to induce changes in attentional bias (AB). We investigated whether visual probe ABM generalised to different measures of AB besides the visual probe task (VPT), and thus whether ABM genuinely changes attentional processing. We trained participants (N = 60) to either attend towards or away from angry facial expressions, and we examined training effects on the dot probe task, the exogenous cueing task, and the visual search task. We found a small change in AB in the VPT, but this effect did not transfer to the exogenous cueing task or the visual search task. Our study shows that ABM does not necessarily lead to generalised effects on AB. This finding can be explained by the poor psychometric properties of the AB measures.

KEYWORDS:

• Attentional bias
• ABM
• cognitive bias modification
• anxiety
• generalisation

Notes

¹Effect sizes for within-group differences and interactions were estimated using Cohen's ƒ, with values from 0.10 representing small effects, values from 0.25 representing medium effects and values from 0.40 representing large effects (Cohen, 1992). We calculated ƒ using the following formula: ƒ.

Additional information

Funding

Bram Van Bockstaele is a postdoctoral researcher of the Research Priority Area YIELD of the University of Amsterdam. Elske Salemink and Reinout Wiers are supported by the Dutch National Science Foundation [grant numbers VENI 451A10A029 and VICI 453A08A001].