Search results for "Attentional bias"

The role of attentional biases to appetitive stimuli in childhood overweight

2018

Overweight during childhood constitutes a high-risk factor for adult obesity. An abnormal attention to food stimuli (i.e., a bias) has been suggested as an underlying mechanism to the onset and/or maintenance of obesity. Previous literature supports the existence of a biased attention toward food stimuli in adults with obesity. However, it is unknown whether this attentional bias occurs in high-risk children for adult obesity. We aimed to examine attentional biases to food at different stages of attention processing in overweight children. A dot-probe task was applied to 25 children with overweight and 25 healthy-weight children (8-12 years old). Attentional preference to or avoidance of pl…

The role of right and left posterior parietal cortex in the modulation of spatial attentional biases by self and non-self face stimuli

2012

In the present research we investigated whether the direction of the attentional bias in line bisection judgment displayed by healthy subjects is influenced by the evaluation of the social distance between self and other. We used inhibitory repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) trains over the right and left parietal cortex to investigate the role of these regions in the task. Following right parietal rTMS, the self face is perceived as closer when it is located at the right line endpoint; following left parietal rTMS, the self face is perceived as closer when it is located at the left line endpoint. In both cases, the side of space ipsilateral to the rTMS is underestimated fr…

Automatic Assessment of Depression Based on Visual Cues: A Systematic Review

2019

International audience; Automatic depression assessment based on visual cues is a rapidly growing research domain. The present exhaustive review of existing approaches as reported in over sixty publications during the last ten years focuses on image processing and machine learning algorithms. Visual manifestations of depression, various procedures used for data collection, and existing datasets are summarized. The review outlines methods and algorithms for visual feature extraction, dimensionality reduction, decision methods for classification and regression approaches, as well as different fusion strategies. A quantitative meta-analysis of reported results, relying on performance metrics r…

Attentional biases to emotional scenes in schizophrenia: An eye-tracking study

2020

Attentional biases to emotional information may play a key role in the onset and course of schizophrenia. The aim of this experiment was to examine the attentional processing of four emotional scenes in competition (happy, neutral, sad, threatening) in 53 patients with schizophrenia and 51 controls. The eye movements were recorded in a 20-seconds free-viewing task. The results were: (i) patients showed increased attention on threatening scenes, compared to controls, in terms of attentional engagement and maintenance; (ii) patients payed less attention to happy scenes than controls, in terms of attentional maintenance; (iii) whereas positive symptoms were associated with a late avoidance of …

Cognitive processes related to problematic pornography use (PPU): A systematic review of experimental studies

2021

Highlights • Some people experience symptoms derived from pornography viewing. • Cognitive processes may be related to the development of Problematic Pornography Use (PPU). • We performed a systematic review of 21 studies exploring cognitive processes related to PPU. • We identified 4 cognitive processes relevant for the development and maintenance of PPU.

Unreliability of the dot probe task

2005

The dot probe task is a widely used measure of attention allocation to threatening stimuli. The present two studies examine the reliability of different versions of this task using words as well as pictures as stimulus material. Estimates of both internal consistency and retest reliability over one week lead to the conclusion that the dot probe task is a completely unreliable measure of attentional allocation in non‐clinical samples. This unreliability may explain the inconsistent findings for the dot probe task as reported in the literature. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Regulating the blink: Cognitive reappraisal modulates attention

2014

Our brain is unable to fully process all the sensory signals we encounter. Attention is the process that helps selecting input from all available information for detailed processing and it is largely influenced by the affective value of the stimuli. This study examined if attentional bias towards emotional stimuli can be modulated by cognitively changing their emotional value. Participants were presented with negative and neutral images from four different scene-categories depicting humans (‘Reading’, ‘Working’, ‘Crying’ and ’Violence’). Using cognitive reappraisal subjects decreased and increased the negativity of one negative (e.g., ‘Crying’) and one neutral (e.g., ‘Reading’) category res…

Behavioral Restriction Determines Left Attentional Bias: Preliminary Evidences From COVID-19 Lockdown

2021

International audience; During the COVID-19 lockdown, individuals were forced to remain at home, hence severely limiting the interaction within environmental stimuli, reducing the cognitive load placed on spatial competences. The effects of the behavioral restriction on cognition have been little examined. The present study is aimed at analyzing the effects of lockdown on executive function prominently involved in adapting behavior to new environmental demands. We analyze non-verbal fluency abilities, as indirectly providing a measure of cognitive flexibility to react to spatial changes. Sixteen students (mean age 20.75; SD 1.34), evaluated before the start of the lockdown (T1) in a battery…

Threatening information in social phobia : inadequate self, social evaluation and the effect of task repetition

2002

Modulation of attention by socio-emotional scenes in children with autism spectrum disorder

2017

Background: Abnormal attentional processes to socially relevant information may underlie social impairment in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). To examine how these processes are modulated by the emotional salience of the stimuli, we studied the attentional biases to social scenes (happy, sad, and threatening) in ASD children. Method: An emotional dot-probe task was applied to children (from 6 to 12 years old) with Autism Spectrum Disorder without additional language and/or intellectual impairments (ASD; n=25) and age/sex-matched controls (n=25). Results: ASD children showed an attentional bias toward threatening scenes while typically developing children tended to direct their attention towa…