Abstract
Various experimental tasks suggest that fear guides attention. However, because these tasks often lack ecological validity, it is unclear to what extent results from these tasks can be generalized to real-life situations. In change detection tasks, a brief interruption of the visual input (i.e., a blank interval or a scene cut) often results in undetected changes in the scene. This setup resembles real-life viewing behavior and is used here to increase ecological validity of the attentional task without compromising control over the stimuli presented. Spider-fearful and nonfearful women detected schematic spiders and flowers that were added to one of two identical background pictures that alternated with a brief blank in between them (i.e., flicker paradigm). Results showed that spider-fearful women detected spiders (but not flowers) faster than did nonfearful women. Because spiders and flowers had similar low-level features, these findings suggest that fear guides attention on the basis of object features rather than simple low-level features.
References
2007). Heroin-related attentional bias and monthly frequency of heroin use are positively associated in attenders of a harm reduction service. Addictive Behaviors, 32, 784–792.
(2005). Emotional conditioning to masked stimuli and modulation of visuospatial attention. Emotion, 5(1), 67–79.
(2004). A Swedish translation and validation of the disgust scale: A measure of disgust sensitivity. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 45(4), 279–284.
(2006). Tracking fear in snake and spider fearful participants during visual search: A multi-response domain study. Cognition & Emotion, 20(8), 1075–1091.
(2007). The detection of fear-relevant stimuli: Are guns noticed as quickly as snakes?. Emotion, 7(4), 691–696.
(1996). Gender and age differences in the prevalence of specific fears and phobias. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 34(1), 33–39.
(1994). Individual differences in sensitivity to disgust: A scale sampling seven domains of disgust elicitors. Personality and Individual Differences, 16(5), 701–713.
(1974). Psychometric description of some specific-fear questionnaires. Behavior Therapy, 5, 401–409.
(2005). Attentional bias to pictures of fear-relevant animals in a dot probe task. Emotion, 5(3), 365–369.
(2007). When danger lurks in the background: Attentional capture by animal fear-relevant distractors is specific and selectively enhanced by animal fear. Emotion, 7(1), 192–200.
(2006). Fear-relevant change detection in spider-fearful and non-fearful participants. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 20(4), 510–519.
(2001). Emotion drives attention: Detecting the snake in the grass. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130(3), 466–478.
(2000). The dynamic representation of scenes. Visual Cognition, 7(1–3), 17–42.
(2002). Change detection. Annual Review of Psychology, 53(1), 245–277.
(1997). To see or not to see: The need for attention to perceive changes in scenes. Psychological Science, 8(5), 368–373.
(2006). Spider fearful individuals attend to threat, then quickly avoid it: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 115(2), 231–238.
(2002). Reliability and validity of German versions of three instruments measuring fear of spiders. Diagnostica, 48(3), 141–149.
(1996). Computing contrasts, effect sizes, and counternulls on other people’s published data: General procedures for research consumers. Psychological Methods, 1(4), 331–340.
(1998). Failure to detect changes to people during a real-world interaction. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 5(4), 644–649.
(1983). Manual for the state-trait anxiety inventory. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists.
(2007). Attentional blink to emotional and threatening pictures in spider phobics: Electrophysiology and behavior. Brain Research, 1148, 149–160.
(2000). Color, form and luminance capture attention in visual search. Vision Research, 40(13), 1639–1643.
(2005). How brains beware: Neural mechanisms of emotional attention. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(12), 585–594.
(2001). Beware and be aware: Capture of spatial attention by fear-related stimuli in neglect. Neuroreport, 12(6), 1119–1122.
(