Abstract:
Previous research has shown that state anxiety facilitates stimulus-driven attentional capture and impairs goal-directed attentional control by increasing sensitivity to salient distractors or threat cues or narrowing spatial attention. However, recent findings in this area have been mixed, and less is known about how state-dependent anxiety may affect attentional performance. Here, we employed a novel dual-target search paradigm to investigate this relationship. This paradigm allowed us to investigate attentional control and how focus narrows under different anxiety states. Participants watched a short movie-either anxiety-inducing or neutral-before engaging in the dual-target visual search task. We found that they performed faster and more accurately in trials without the salient distractor compared to those with distractors, and they performed better in tasks presented on the center than the periphery. However, despite a significant increase in self-reported anxiety in the anxiety-inducing session, participants\' performance in terms of speed and accuracy remain comparable across both anxious and neutral sessions. This resilience is likely due to compensatory mechanisms that offset anxiety, a result of the high demands and working memory load inherent in the dual-target task.
摘要:
先前的研究表明,状态焦虑通过增加对显着干扰者或威胁线索的敏感性或缩小空间注意力来促进刺激驱动的注意力捕获并损害目标导向的注意力控制。然而,这方面的最新发现喜忧参半,而对状态依赖性焦虑如何影响注意力表现知之甚少。这里,我们采用了一种新的双目标搜索范式来研究这种关系。这种范式使我们能够研究注意力控制以及在不同焦虑状态下焦点如何变窄。参与者在参与双目标视觉搜索任务之前,观看了一部短片-焦虑诱导或中立。我们发现,与那些有干扰者相比,他们在没有显著干扰者的试验中表现更快、更准确,他们在中心呈现的任务中比外围表现得更好。然而,尽管在引发焦虑的过程中自我报告的焦虑显着增加,参与者在速度和准确性方面的表现在焦虑和中立的会议上保持可比。这种韧性可能是由于补偿机制抵消了焦虑,由于双目标任务固有的高要求和工作内存负载。