Rapid attentional biases to threat-associated visual features: The roles of anxiety and visual working memory access.

Berggren, Nick · 2020 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.1037/emo0000761

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Summary

This study investigates the consequences of attentional capture by threat-related stimuli, specifically examining whether processing threat influences subsequent visual search through feature-based attention biases. While it is well-established that anxious individuals exhibit heightened attention to threat, less is known about how this capture affects the processing of non-spatial features associated with the threat. The authors hypothesized that attending to a threat stimulus might prioritize its visual features (e.g., color), causing subsequent objects sharing those features to compete for attention, even if they are not themselves threatening. The research comprised two experiments using a visual search task. In Experiment 1, participants ignored face cues (neutral, happy, or angry) filtered in various colors before searching for a target shape. The color of the face cue sometimes reappeared as a distractor in the search display. Results showed that while neutral and happy faces had no impact, angry faces caused slower reaction times when their color reappeared as a distractor. Crucially, this "color presence cost" was significantly correlated with individual differences in trait anxiety; higher anxiety levels predicted stronger biases toward threat-associated colors. Experiment 2 manipulated task relevance by requiring participants to memorize face cues for occasional probe trials, thereby ensuring deep processing of the stimuli. Under these conditions, a general color presence cost emerged for all participants, regardless of the face’s emotional valence (neutral or angry) or their trait anxiety levels. This indicated that when stimuli are voluntarily encoded into visual working memory, their features bias subsequent attention irrespective of threat content or personality traits. The findings suggest that anxiety-related attentional biases, such as delayed disengagement from threat, may stem from the involuntary encoding of task-irrelevant threat stimuli into visual working memory. High-anxious individuals appear to grant privileged depth of processing to threat cues, leading to associative biases toward their features. However, these biases are not unique to threat; they occur for any object deeply processed and maintained in visual working memory. This challenges the view that threat biases are solely driven by the motivational significance of danger, highlighting instead the role of visual working memory representation in guiding selective attention.

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• stress arousal performance