Building on the work of Lavy and van den Hout (Lavy, E. H., & van den Hout, M. A. (1994a). Cognitive avoidance and attentional bias: Causal relationships. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 18 (2) 179-191; Lavy, E. H., & van den Hout, M. A. (1994b). Cognitive avoidance and attentional bias: Causal relationships. Behavior Therapy, 24, 645-657), the purpose of the present study was to examine a func...

BACKGROUND It is well known that facial expressions represent important social cues. In humans expressing facial emotion, fear may be configured to maximize sensory exposure (e.g., increases visual input) whereas disgust can reduce sensory exposure (e.g., decreases visual input). To investigate whether such effects also extend to the attentional system, we used the "attentional blink" (AB) para...

Fearful faces receive privileged access to awareness relative to happy and nonemotional faces. We investigated whether this advantage depends on currently available attentional resources. In an attentional blink paradigm, observers detected faces presented during the attentional blink period that could depict either a fearful or a happy expression. Perceptual load of the blink-inducing target w...

In a set of three rapid serial visual presentation experiments, we investigated the effect of fearful and neutral face stimuli on the report of trailing scene targets. When the emotional expression of the face stimuli had to be indicated, fearful faces induced a stronger attentional blink (AB) than did neutral faces. However, with identical physical stimulation, the enhancement of the AB by fea...

The attentional blink (AB) is one impressive demonstration of limited attentional capacities in time: a second target (T2) is often missed when it should be detected within 200-600 ms after a first target. According to the dynamic attending theory, attention cycles oscillatory. Regular rhythms (i.e., pulses) should evoke expectations regarding the point of the next occurrence of a tone/element ...

If the amygdala is involved in shaping perceptual experience when affectively significant visual items are encountered, responses in this structure should be correlated with both visual cortex responses and behavioral reports. Here, we investigated how affective significance shapes visual perception during an attentional blink paradigm combined with aversive conditioning. Behaviorally, followin...

Because of attentional limitations, the human visual system can process for awareness and response only a fraction of the input received. Lesion and functional imaging studies have identified frontal, temporal, and parietal areas as playing a major role in the attentional control of visual processing, but very little is known about how these areas interact to form a dynamic attentional network....

background according to recent theories on addiction, attentional bias towards drug-related stimuli plays a pivotal role in the initiation of drug abuse. objectives the present study attempted to investigate attentional bias towards drug-related words in addicts and non-addicts. patients and methods to attain the objectives, following a causal-comparative study, a number of 15 addicts under tre...

This study examined whether comorbid symptoms influence the attentional biases associated with social anxiety and dysphoria using the Emotional Stroop Task (EST). Participants were recruited into three groups: a Social Anxiety group, a Dysphoric group, and a Social Anxiety/Dysphoric group. Four types of stimulus words were used: social anxiety threat, depressive threat, neutral words, and posit...

Objective: Previous research has shown that attentional bias towards game-related stimuli is a significant factor in the etiology, maintenance and severity of Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD). Therefore, interventions targeting attentional bias towards game-related stimuli, can potentially ameliorate this disorder. The aim of the present research was to examine the effectiveness of online Attenti...