Covert attention is attracted to prior target locations: Evidence from the probe paradigm

Attentional biases to signals of negative information: Reliable measurement across three anxiety domains

Cognitive models propose that individuals with elevated vulnerability to experiencing negative emotion are characterised by biased attentional responding to negative information. Typically, methods of examining these biases have measured attention to pictures of emotional scenes, emotional faces, or rewarding or feared objects. Though these approaches have repeatedly yielded evidence of anxiety-linked biases, their measurement reliability is suggested to be poor. Recent research has shown that attentional responding to cues signalling negative information can be measured with greater reliability. However, whether such biases are associated with emotion vulnerability remains to be demonstrated. The present study conducted three experiments that recruited participants who varied in trait and state anxiety (N = 134), social anxiety (N = 122), or spider fear (N = 131) to complete an assessment of selective attention to cues signalling emotionally congruent negative information. Analyses demonstrated that anxiety and fear were associated with biased attentional responding to cues signalling negative information, and that such biases could be measured with acceptable reliability (rsplit-half = .69-.81). Implications for research on the relation between emotion and attention are discussed.

On preventing capture: Does greater salience cause greater suppression?

It has been proposed that salient objects have high potential to disrupt target performance, and so people learn to proactively suppress them, thereby preventing these salient distractors from capturing attention in the future. Consistent with this hypothesis, Gaspar et al. (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(13), 3693-3698, 2016) reported that the PD (believed to index suppression) was larger for high-salient color distractors than for low-salient color distractors. The present study looked for converging evidence that salience triggers suppression using established behavior measures of suppression. Following Gaspar et al., our participants searched for a yellow target circle among nine background circles, which sometimes included one circle with a unique color. The distractor was either high or low in salience with respect to the background circles. The question was whether the high-salient color would be proactively suppressed more strongly than the low-salient color. This was assessed using the capture-probe paradigm. On 33% of trials, probe letters appeared inside colored circles and participants were to report those letters. If high-salient colors are more strongly suppressed, then probe recall accuracy should be lower at locations with the high-salient color than those with the low-salient color. Experiment 1 found no such effect. A similar finding was observed in Experiment 2 after addressing possible floor effects. These findings suggest that proactive suppression is not caused by salience. We propose that the PD reflects not only proactive suppression but also reactive suppression.

The influence of category representativeness on the low prevalence effect in visual search

Visual search is greatly affected by the appearance rate of given target types, such that low-prevalence items are harder to detect, which has consequences for real-world search tasks where target frequency cannot be balanced. However, targets that are highly representative of a categorically defined task set are also easier to find. We hypothesized that targets that are highly representative are less vulnerable to low-prevalence effects because an observer's attentional set prioritizes guidance toward them even when they are rare. We assessed this hypothesis by first determining the categorical structure of "prohibited carry-ons" via an exemplar-naming task, and used this structure to assess how category representativeness interacted with prevalence. Specifically, from the exemplar-naming task we selected a commonly named (knives) and rarely named (gas cans) target for a search task in which one of the targets was shown infrequently. As predicted, highly representative targets were found more easily than their less representative counterparts, but they also were less affected by prevalence manipulations. Experiment 1b replicated the results with targets matched for emotional valence (water bottles and fireworks). These findings demonstrate the powerful explanatory power of theories of attentional guidance that incorporate the dynamic influence of recent experience with the knowledge that comes from life experience to better predict behavioral outcomes associated with high-stakes search environments.