Altering attentional control settings causes persistent biases of visual attention H Knight1, D T Smith2, A Ellison2 |
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1Department of Psychology, Durham University, United Kingdom |
| Internal biases have an important role in guiding visual attention however, little is known about how attentional bias initially develops. Here, we show that it is possible to induce an attentional bias towards an arbitrary stimulus (the colour green) using a single information sheet and assessed through a change detection task. After an interval of either 1 or 2 weeks participants were then either re-tested on the same change detection task, or tested on a difference change detection task where colour was irrelevant. This latter experiment included trials where the distracter stimuli (but never the target stimuli) were green. The key finding was that green stimuli in the second task attracted attention, even though they were explicitly irrelevant. The induced attentional bias altered participants’ sensitivity towards bias-related stimuli (calculated via d’) and persisted for at least two weeks. We speculate that changes to attentional control settings account for these findings. Attentional bias has an established role in the persistence of various psychopathologies such as addiction, however our findings explore the phenomenon outside of emotional and neurochemical factors confounding previous studies of attentional bias. We suggest an underlying shared cognitive basis of attentional bias upon which the pathology-specific aspects are built. |
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