Anticipation of aversive threat potentiates task-irrelevant attentional capture

Gutierrez, Monica; Berggren, Nick · 2020 · Crossref

DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2019.1706448

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Summary

This study investigates how acute anxious apprehension influences selective attention, specifically addressing inconsistent findings regarding whether anxiety increases or decreases distractibility. While high trait anxiety is consistently linked to impaired attentional control, research on acute state anxiety has produced conflicting results, often relying on response-competition tasks like the Stroop test. These tasks may confound selective attention with motor control processes. To isolate the effects of anxiety on visual attention, Gutierrez and Berggren (2020) employed a visual search paradigm that measures task-irrelevant attentional capture without response competition. The researchers hypothesized that if acute anxiety mirrors trait anxiety, it would increase distractibility; conversely, if it aligns with Easterbrook’s cue utilization theory, it might reduce distraction by narrowing attention. The experiment involved 42 participants who performed a visual search task, locating a diamond target among circles and identifying the orientation of a line within the diamond. On half of the trials, a salient color singleton distractor was present. To induce apprehension, participants completed blocks where there was a low probability (12.5%) of loud, aversive sounds being presented immediately after the search display. The study analyzed reaction times (RTs) only on trials where noise was anticipated but not played, comparing these "threat" blocks to "safe" blocks where no noise was possible. This design allowed the researchers to assess the impact of threat anticipation on attentional capture. The results demonstrated a significant interaction between noise condition and distractor presence. In the safe condition, the presence of a color distractor caused only a marginal increase in RTs (8 ms). However, in the threat condition, distractor presence significantly slowed responses by 23 ms. This indicates that the anticipation of aversive threat potentiated attentional capture by task-irrelevant stimuli. Error rates were generally low and did not show significant interactions with the experimental conditions. Self-report ratings confirmed that participants experienced low to moderate anxiety and stress during threat blocks, though these subjective ratings did not strongly correlate with the magnitude of distractibility effects. The findings suggest that acute apprehension disrupts top-down attentional control, leading to increased distractibility similar to patterns observed in high trait anxiety. This contradicts the cue utilization account, which predicts reduced distractibility under stress. The authors argue that previous findings of improved attentional control under acute anxiety may stem from methodological confounds in response-competition tasks, which engage motor inhibition processes distinct from visual selective attention. The study highlights a generalized role for anxious emotion in increasing susceptibility to distraction, supporting Attentional Control Theory’s proposition that anxiety impairs executive attention mechanisms. Future research is needed to dissociate whether this effect arises from impaired suppression of distractors or enhanced saliency-driven capture.

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• stress arousal performance