Anticipation of aversive threat potentiates task-irrelevant attentional capture

ABSTRACT

Anxiety is believed to have a disruptive effect on attentional control, supported by evidence of increased distractibility among high trait anxious individuals. However, how feelings of current anxious apprehension influence selective attention is less well-understood. The present study examined this by assessing attentional capture by a novel distractor within a visual search task. Participants searched an array of coloured objects for a shape-defined target, while attempting to ignore a colour singleton distractor presented on half of the trials. To induce apprehension, participants completed the task in some blocks with a low probability threat of loud aversive sounds being presented. We found significantly increased distractibility within the threat condition when noise was anticipated but not played, as reflected by a larger distractor presence cost to reaction times. The finding that apprehension potentiates task-irrelevant attentional capture suggests a generalised role of anxious emotion in increasing distractibility.

KEYWORDS:

• Threat
• Anxiety
• Stress
• Selective attention
• top-down control

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Note that such an effect in relation to response-competition may be specific to state inducements of anxiety; while there is evidence that chronically anxious individuals also show improvements in motor stopping (Grillon et al., 2017), response-competition as a marker of distractibility is often found to be increased in high trait anxiety (Berggren & Derakshan, 2014; Bishop, 2009; Pacheco-Unguetti et al., 2010).

2 The sound files from the IADS database used were 105(1), 105(2), 106, 134, 275, 276, 277, 310, 312, 319, 380, 420, 422, 424, 600, 626, 709, 711, 712, 714, 719 and 732.

3 Note that presenting other horizontal/vertical line objects could create motor conflict between target and non-target items’ associated response. As this conflict was constant across the experimental task, however, its effect should be independent to that of attentional capture by colour singletons. It is possible though that interactions between types of conflict could occur and also in conjunction with the effect of threat anticipation.

4 As colour, specifically red, can hold implicit affective value related to danger (e.g. Friedman & Förster, 2010), we assessed if this may have contributed to observed findings. An additional analysis including Distractor Colour as a factor indeed showed an interaction with Distractor Presence (F(1, 41) = 6.54, p = .01, ${\eta }_p^2$= 0.14), with larger distractor costs for red singletons (M_diff = 23 vs. 8 ms). There was no significant two-way (F < 1) or three-way interaction with Noise Condition (F(1, 41) = 1.52, p = .22), suggesting that heightened distractibility by red singletons was unrelated to increased distractibility found in the threat condition. We thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), UK (Grant No. ES/R003459/1), awarded to author NB.