BACKGROUND Evidence suggests that individuals with social anxiety demonstrate vigilance to social threat, whilst the peptide hormone oxytocin is widely accepted as supporting affiliative behaviour in humans. METHODS This study investigated whether oxytocin can affect attentional bias in social anxiety. In a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, within-group study design, 26 healthy an...

This study investigated the influence of situational and dispositional factors on attentional biases toward social threat, and the impact of these attentional biases on distress in a sample of adolescents. The results suggest greater biases for personally relevant threat cues, as individuals reporting high social stress were vigilant to subliminal social threat cues, but not physical threat cue...

Information-processing bottlenecks are characteristic of many cognitive and neural systems. One such bottleneck is revealed by tasks in which rapidly successive stimulus events must be reported. Here, observers missed the second of two visual targets if it occurred within 700 ms of the first [an "attentional blink" (AB)], even though this second target could be reported accurately when the firs...

Optimal decision-making often requires exercising self-control. A growing fMRI literature has implicated the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) in successful self-control, but due to the limitations inherent in BOLD measures of brain activity, the neurocomputational role of this region has not been resolved. Here we exploit the high temporal resolution and whole-brain coverage of event-rela...

Several recent behavioral studies have shown that the enumeration of a small number of items (a process termed subitizing) depends on the availability of attentional resources and is not a preattentive process as previously thought. Here we studied the neural correlates of visual enumeration under different attentional loads in a dual-task paradigm using fMRI. Relatively intact subitizing under...

Many studies have found a strong coupling between selective attention and eye movements. The premotor theory of attention suggests that saccade preparation is directly responsible for such attentional shifts. While it has already been shown that the attentional shift is not directly coupled to the final stages of motor execution, it is currently unknown to what aspect of the earlier stages of s...

Introduction: According to the pain research literature, attentional bias for pain is the mechanism responsible for the development and maintenance of fear of pain in patients with chronic pain. However, there is still some debate about the exact mechanism and the role of faster engagement versus difficulty in disengagement in the development of attentional bias.  Methods: To investigate ...

■ Several recent behavioral studies have shown that the enumeration of a small number of items (a process termed subitizing) depends on the availability of attentional resources and is not a preattentive process as previously thought. Here we studied the neural correlates of visual enumeration under different attentional loads in a dual-task paradigm using fMRI. Relatively intact subitizing und...