Dot-probe paradigm

Last updated

The dot-probe paradigm is a test used by cognitive psychologists to assess selective attention.

Contents

According to Eysenck, MacLeod & Mathews (1987) and Mathews (2004) the dot-probe task derives directly from research carried out by Christos Halkiopoulos in 1981. Halkiopoulos, later a doctoral student of Eysenck, carried out this research while he was a psychology undergraduate at UCL, under the supervision of professor N.F. Dixon. He introduced an attentional probe paradigm, which he initially used in the auditory modality to assess attentional biases to threatening auditory information, when threatening and non-threatening information was presented simultaneously to both ears in a dichotic listening task ( [1] [2] [3] ). Halkiopoulos demonstrated attentional biases by measuring reaction times to auditory probes following neutral and emotional words in the attended and the unattended channels. This method was subsequently used in the visual modality by MacLeod, Mathews and Tata (1986) in what came to be known as the dot probe paradigm. As professor Mathews puts it when in an interview he discusses his team's research and his collaboration with Eysenck: "Then Michael Eysenck made contact, and we picked the idea for the dot probe method from his student, Christos Halkiopoulos. I certainly remember that being a really fun time" (Mathews in Borkovec, 2004, p.13). Halkiopoulos's initial research is described by Eysenck, MacLeod and Mathews (1987) and, in some more technical detail, by Eysenck (1991).

"In many cases, the dot-probe paradigm is used to assess selective attention to threatening stimuli in individuals diagnosed with anxiety disorders. Biases have also been investigated in other disorders via this paradigm, including depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and chronic pain. Attention biases toward positive stimuli have been associated with a number of positive outcomes such as increased social engagement, increased prosocial behavior, decreased externalizing disorders, and decreased emotionally withdrawn behavior. [4]

Procedure and method

During the dot-probe task, participants are situated in front of a computer screen and asked to stare at a fixation cross on the center of the screen. Two stimuli, one of which is neutral and one of which is threatening, appear randomly on either side of the screen. The stimuli are presented for a predetermined length of time (most commonly 500ms), before a dot is presented in the location of one former stimulus. Participants are instructed to indicate the location of this dot as quickly as possible, either via keyboard or response box. Latency is measured automatically by the computer. The fixation cross appears again for several seconds and then the cycle is repeated. Quicker reaction time to the dot when it occurs in the previous location of a threatening stimulus is interpreted as vigilance to threat.

Clinical uses

Researchers have recently begun using a modified version of the dot-probe task to retrain the attentional bias. In this version, the probe replaces the neutral stimuli 100% of the time or the salient stimuli 100% of the time. Over the course of a number of trials the attentional bias for salient stimuli can be reduced (in the case of the 'replace-neutral' condition) or enhanced (in the case of the 'replace-salient' condition). [5] This method of retraining the attentional bias is called attentional retraining.

Some studies that use a dot-probe task

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arousal</span> State of being awoken

Arousal is the physiological and psychological state of being awoken or of sense organs stimulated to a point of perception. It involves activation of the ascending reticular activating system (ARAS) in the brain, which mediates wakefulness, the autonomic nervous system, and the endocrine system, leading to increased heart rate and blood pressure and a condition of sensory alertness, desire, mobility, and readiness to respond.

In psychology, the Stroop effect is the delay in reaction time between congruent and incongruent stimuli.

Affective neuroscience is the study of how the brain processes emotions. This field combines neuroscience with the psychological study of personality, emotion, and mood. The basis of emotions and what emotions are remains an issue of debate within the field of affective neuroscience.

In psychology, the emotional Stroop task is used as an information-processing approach to assessing emotions. Like the standard Stroop effect, the emotional Stroop test works by examining the response time of the participant to name colors of words presented to them. Unlike the traditional Stroop effect, the words presented either relate to specific emotional states or disorders, or they are neutral. For example, depressed participants will be slower to say the color of depressing words rather than non-depressing words. Non-clinical subjects have also been shown to name the color of an emotional word slower than naming the color of a neutral word. Negative words selected for the emotional Stroop task can be either preselected by researchers or taken from the lived experiences of participants completing the task. Typically, when asked to identify the color of the words presented to them, participants reaction times for negative emotional words is slower than the identification of the color of neutral words. While it has been shown that those in negative moods tend to take longer to respond when presented with negative word stimuli, this is not always the case when participants are presented with words that are positive or more neutral in tone.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Affect (psychology)</span> Experience of feeling or emotion

Affect, in psychology, refers to the underlying experience of feeling, emotion or mood.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Worry</span> Thoughts, images, emotions, and actions of a pessimistic nature

Worry refers to the thoughts, images, emotions, and actions of a negative nature in a repetitive, uncontrollable manner that results from a proactive cognitive risk analysis made to avoid or solve anticipated potential threats and their potential consequences.

Attentional bias refers to how a person's perception is affected by selective factors in their attention. Attentional biases may explain an individual's failure to consider alternative possibilities when occupied with an existing train of thought. For example, cigarette smokers have been shown to possess an attentional bias for smoking-related cues around them, due to their brain's altered reward sensitivity. Attentional bias has also been associated with clinically relevant symptoms such as anxiety and depression.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Negative priming</span> Initial stimulus inhibits response to subsequent stimulus

Negative priming is an implicit memory effect in which prior exposure to a stimulus unfavorably influences the response to the same stimulus. It falls under the category of priming, which refers to the change in the response towards a stimulus due to a subconscious memory effect. Negative priming describes the slow and error-prone reaction to a stimulus that is previously ignored. For example, a subject may be imagined trying to pick a red pen from a pen holder. The red pen becomes the target of attention, so the subject responds by moving their hand towards it. At this time, they mentally block out all other pens as distractors to aid in closing in on just the red pen. After repeatedly picking the red pen over the others, switching to the blue pen results in a momentary delay picking the pen out. The slow reaction due to the change of the distractor stimulus to target stimulus is called the negative priming effect.

Emotion can have a powerful effect on humans and animals. Numerous studies have shown that the most vivid autobiographical memories tend to be of emotional events, which are likely to be recalled more often and with more clarity and detail than neutral events.

In neuroscience, the visual P200 or P2 is a waveform component or feature of the event-related potential (ERP) measured at the human scalp. Like other potential changes measurable from the scalp, this effect is believed to reflect the post-synaptic activity of a specific neural process. The P2 component, also known as the P200, is so named because it is a positive going electrical potential that peaks at about 200 milliseconds after the onset of some external stimulus. This component is often distributed around the centro-frontal and the parieto-occipital areas of the scalp. It is generally found to be maximal around the vertex of the scalp, however there have been some topographical differences noted in ERP studies of the P2 in different experimental conditions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Visual N1</span>

The visual N1 is a visual evoked potential, a type of event-related electrical potential (ERP), that is produced in the brain and recorded on the scalp. The N1 is so named to reflect the polarity and typical timing of the component. The "N" indicates that the polarity of the component is negative with respect to an average mastoid reference. The "1" originally indicated that it was the first negative-going component, but it now better indexes the typical peak of this component, which is around 150 to 200 milliseconds post-stimulus. The N1 deflection may be detected at most recording sites, including the occipital, parietal, central, and frontal electrode sites. Although, the visual N1 is widely distributed over the entire scalp, it peaks earlier over frontal than posterior regions of the scalp, suggestive of distinct neural and/or cognitive correlates. The N1 is elicited by visual stimuli, and is part of the visual evoked potential – a series of voltage deflections observed in response to visual onsets, offsets, and changes. Both the right and left hemispheres generate an N1, but the laterality of the N1 depends on whether a stimulus is presented centrally, laterally, or bilaterally. When a stimulus is presented centrally, the N1 is bilateral. When presented laterally, the N1 is larger, earlier, and contralateral to the visual field of the stimulus. When two visual stimuli are presented, one in each visual field, the N1 is bilateral. In the latter case, the N1's asymmetrical skewedness is modulated by attention. Additionally, its amplitude is influenced by selective attention, and thus it has been used to study a variety of attentional processes.

The oddball paradigm is an experimental design used within psychology research. Presentations of sequences of repetitive stimuli are infrequently interrupted by a deviant stimulus. The reaction of the participant to this "oddball" stimulus is recorded.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Attentional retraining</span> Retraining of automatic attentional processes

Attentional retraining is the retraining of automatic attentional processes. The method of retraining varies but has typically employed computerized training programs. The term originally indicated retraining of attention to rehabilitate individuals after a brain injury who had neurological disorders of attention including hemineglect, perseveration, limited attention span, and even ADHD. However, in more recent research and clinical applications attentional retraining has also been applied as a type of cognitive bias modification. In this application, attentional retraining refers to the retraining of automatic attentional biases that have been observed in high levels of anxiety.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cognitive bias modification</span>

Cognitive bias modification (CBM) refers to procedures used in psychology that aim to directly change biases in cognitive processes, such as biased attention toward threat stimuli and biased interpretation of ambiguous stimuli as threatening. The procedures are designed to modify information processing via cognitive tasks that use basic learning principles and repeated practice to encourage a healthier thinking style in line with the training contingency.

Pre-attentive processing is the subconscious accumulation of information from the environment. All available information is pre-attentively processed. Then, the brain filters and processes what is important. Information that has the highest salience or relevance to what a person is thinking about is selected for further and more complete analysis by conscious (attentive) processing. Understanding how pre-attentive processing works is useful in advertising, in education, and for prediction of cognitive ability.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Attentional control</span> Individuals capacity to choose what they pay attention to and what they ignore

Attentional control, colloquially referred to as concentration, refers to an individual's capacity to choose what they pay attention to and what they ignore. It is also known as endogenous attention or executive attention. In lay terms, attentional control can be described as an individual's ability to concentrate. Primarily mediated by the frontal areas of the brain including the anterior cingulate cortex, attentional control is thought to be closely related to other executive functions such as working memory.

Emotion perception refers to the capacities and abilities of recognizing and identifying emotions in others, in addition to biological and physiological processes involved. Emotions are typically viewed as having three components: subjective experience, physical changes, and cognitive appraisal; emotion perception is the ability to make accurate decisions about another's subjective experience by interpreting their physical changes through sensory systems responsible for converting these observed changes into mental representations. The ability to perceive emotion is believed to be both innate and subject to environmental influence and is also a critical component in social interactions. How emotion is experienced and interpreted depends on how it is perceived. Likewise, how emotion is perceived is dependent on past experiences and interpretations. Emotion can be accurately perceived in humans. Emotions can be perceived visually, audibly, through smell and also through bodily sensations and this process is believed to be different from the perception of non-emotional material.

The neurocircuitry that underlies executive function processes and emotional and motivational processes are known to be distinct in the brain. However, there are brain regions that show overlap in function between the two cognitive systems. Brain regions that exist in both systems are interesting mainly for studies on how one system affects the other. Examples of such cross-modal functions are emotional regulation strategies such as emotional suppression and emotional reappraisal, the effect of mood on cognitive tasks, and the effect of emotional stimulation of cognitive tasks.

The anti-saccade (AS) task is a gross estimation of injury or dysfunction of the frontal lobe, by assessing the brain’s ability to inhibit the reflexive saccade. Saccadic eye movement is primarily controlled by the frontal cortex.

Interpretive bias or interpretation bias is an information-processing bias, the tendency to inappropriately analyze ambiguous stimuli, scenarios and events. One type of interpretive bias is hostile attribution bias, wherein individuals perceive benign or ambiguous behaviors as hostile. For example, a situation in which one friend walks past another without acknowledgement. The individual may interpret this behavior to mean that their friend is angry with them.

References

  1. Halkiopoulos (1981)
  2. Eysenck, M., MacLeod, C. & Mathews, A. (1987). "Cognitive functioning and anxiety". Psychological Research. 39 (2–3): 189–195. doi:10.1007/bf00308686. PMID   3313488. S2CID   41582695.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  3. Mathews, 1990
  4. Troller-Renfree, S.; Martin McDermott, J.; Nelson, C.A.; Zeanah, C.H.; Fox, N.A. (2014). "The effects of early foster care intervention on attention biases in previously institutionalized children in Romania". Developmental Science. 18 (5): 713–722. doi:10.1111/desc.12261. PMC   4447605 . PMID   25439678.
  5. Mathews, A., & MacLeod, C. (2002). Induced processing biases have causal effects on anxiety. Cognition & Emotion, 16(3), 331-354.

Borkovec, T.D. (2004). Andrew Mathews: a brief history of a clinical scientist. In Yiend, J. (Ed.), Cognition, Emotion and Psychopathology: Theoretical, Empirical and Clinical Directions. Cambridge University Press.

Eysenck, M. W> (1991)Trait anxiety and cognition. in C. D. Spielberger, I.G., Sarason, Z. Kulczar & J. Van Heck (Eds.), Stress and Emotion (Vol. 14). Hemisphere.