title: Who sees trees before forest? The obsessive-compulsive style of visual attention.
abstract: It has been suggested that individuals with obsessive-compulsive personalities tend to focus on small local details in their surroundings, whereas histrionic individuals are characterized by more global information processing. Using the global-local hierarchical-letters paradigm, we were able to provide support for the first but not the second hypothesis. Measures related to obsessive-compulsive personality disorder were associated with excessive visual attention to small details of the hierarchical letters. Specifically, the obsessive-compulsive cognitive style was associated with local interference, which reflects the effects of distraction by to-be-ignored small details on identification of global information.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, 15 Parkman St., ACC 812, Boston, MA 02114-3117, USA. iyovel@partners.org
authors.forename: Iftah
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Yovel
authors.forename: William
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Revelle
authors.forename: Susan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Mineka
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D003193:Compulsive Personality Disorder / Q000523:psychology*; D003210:Concept Formation; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D005364:Field Dependence-Independence; D006677:Histrionic Personality Disorder / Q000523:psychology; D006801:Humans; D007389:Internal-External Control; D008297:Male; D009949:Orientation; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010555:Personality Inventory; D011930:Reaction Time; D012858:Size Perception; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D013334:Students / Q000523:psychology