Threats, rewards, and attention deployment in anxious youth and adults: An eye tracking study.
The current study examines anxiety and age associations with attention allocation and physiological response to threats and rewards. Twenty-two healthy-adults, 20 anxious-adults, 26 healthy-youth, and 19 anxious-youth completed two eye-tracking tasks. In the Visual Scene Task (VST), participants' fixations were recorded while they viewed a central neutral image flanked by two threatening or two rewarding stimuli. In the Negative Words Task (NWT), physiological response was measured by means of pupil diameter change while negative and neutral words were presented. For both tasks, no interaction was found between anxiety and age-group. In the VST, anxious participants avoided the threatening images when groups were collapsed across age. Similarly, adults but not adolescents avoided the threatening images when collapsed across anxiety. No differences were found for rewarding images. In NWT, all subjects demonstrated increase in pupil dilation after word presentation. Only main effect of age emerged with stronger pupil dilation in adults than children. Finally, maximum pupil change was correlated with threat avoidance bias in the scene task. Gaze patterns and pupil dilation show that anxiety and age are associated with attention allocation to threats. The relations between attention and autonomic arousal point to a complex interaction between bottom-up and top-down processes as they relate to attention allocation.
Psychology Department, University of Haifa, Israel. Electronic address: tshechner@psy.haifa.ac.il.
Tomer
T
Shechner
Section on Development and Affective Neuroscience, NIMH, Bethesda, MD, United States.
Johanna M
JM
Jarcho
Section on Development and Affective Neuroscience, NIMH, Bethesda, MD, United States.
Stuart
S
Wong
Section on Bipolar Disorder, NIMH, Bethesda, MD, United States.
Ellen
E
Leibenluft
Section on Development and Affective Neuroscience, NIMH, Bethesda, MD, United States.
Daniel S
DS
Pine
Section on Development and Affective Neuroscience, NIMH, Bethesda, MD, United States.
Eric E
EE
Nelson
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D001008:Anxiety Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology*; D001143:Arousal; D000070379:Attentional Bias; D001362:Avoidance Learning; D002648:Child; D004644:Emotions; D005133:Eye Movements; D005239:Fear; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011932:Reading; D012025:Reflex, Pupillary; D012201:Reward; D012660:Semantics
Anxiety; Attention allocation; Development; Eye tracking; Pupil dilation; Social and non-social stimuli