Pattern-Induced Visual Discomfort and Anxiety in Migraineurs: Their Relationship and the Effect of Colour

In migraineurs, coloured lenses were found to reduce the visual stress caused by an aversive pattern known to trigger migraines by 70%, but do such patterns also produce a low-level anxiety/fear response? Is this response lessened by colour? We sought to investigate this in a study comprising a broad screening component followed by a dot-probe experiment to elicit attentional biases (AB) to aversive patterns. Undergraduate psychology students completed headache and visual discomfort (VD) questionnaires (N = 358), thereby forming a subject pool from which 13 migraineurs with high visual discomfort and 13 no-headache controls with low visual discomfort, matched on age and sex, completed a dot-probe experiment. Paired stimuli were presented for 500 ms: aversive achromatic 3 cpd square wave gratings vs control, scrambled patterns. These conditions were repeated using the colour that was most comfortable for each participant. VD was greater in the more severe headache groups. On all measures, the migraineurs were more anxious than the controls, and a positive relationship was found between VD and trait anxiety. The 3 cpd gratings elicited an aversive AB in the migraine group which was somewhat reduced by the use of colour, and this was not seen in the controls. The results suggest a new role for colour in reducing visual stress via anxiety/fear reduction.

Tone Probe Paradigm (the dot probe paradigm's forgotten ancestry)

This is my BSc dissertation completed at, and submitted to, UCL's Psychology Department in 1981. It reports on my attentional probe paradigm initially used by myself in the auditory modality to demonstrate attentional biases in the processing of threatening information by participants with identifiable personality characteristics. A group of researchers at St. George's (University of London), introduced to this paradigm by M. W Eysenck, applied my attentional probe paradigm in the visual modality (dot probe paradigm). This dissertation is hand-written, rather hurriedly put together, but still easy to read. The experimental work which introduced the attentional probe paradigm appears towards the end of the dissertation.

The dot-probe attention bias task as a method to assess psychological wellbeing after anesthesia: A study with adult female long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis)

Understanding the impact routine research and laboratory procedures have on animals is crucial to improving their wellbeing and to the success and reproducibility of the research they are involved in. Cognitive measures of welfare offer insight into animals’ internal psychological state, but require validation. Attention bias - the tendency to attend to one type of information over another – is a cognitive phenomenon documented in humans and animals that is known to be modulated by affective state (i.e., emotions). Hence, changes in attention bias may offer researchers a deeper perspective of their animals’ psychological wellbeing. The dot-probe task is an established method for quantifying attention bias in humans (by measuring reaction time to a dot-probe replacing pairs of stimuli), but has yet to be validated in animals. We developed a dot-probe task for long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis) to determine if the task can detect changes in attention bias following anesthesia, a context known to modulate attention and trigger physiological arousal in macaques. Our task included the following features: stimulus pairs of threatening and neutral facial expressions of conspecifics and their scrambled counterparts, two stimuli durations (100 and 1000 ms), and counterbalancing of the dot-probe’s position on the touchscreen (left, right) and location relative to the threatening stimulus. We tested eight group-housed adult females on different days relative to being anesthetized (baseline and one-, three-, seven-, and 14-days after). At baseline, monkeys were vigilant to threatening content when stimulus pairs were presented for 100 ms, but not 1000 ms. On the day immediately following anesthesia, we found evidence that attention bias changed to an avoidance of threatening content. Attention bias returned to threat vigilance by the third day post-anesthesia and remained so up to the last day of testing (14 days after anesthesia). We also found that attention bias was independent of the type of stimuli pair (i.e., whole face vs. scrambled counterparts), suggesting that the scrambled stimuli retained aspects of the original stimuli. Nevertheless, whole faces were more salient to the monkeys as responses to these trials were generally slower than to scrambled stimulus pairs. Overall, our study suggests it is feasible to detect changes in attention bias following anesthesia using the dot-probe task in non-human primates. Our results also reveal important aspects of stimulus preparation and experimental design.

The Study of Security Priming on Avoidant Attentional Biases: Combining Microsaccadic Eye-Movement Measurement With a Dot-Probe Task

Microsaccades are small fixational eye movements that have shown to index covert attentional shifts. The present experiment combined microsaccades with performance measures from a dot-probe task to study influences of attachment security priming on the attentional biases of individuals high in attachment avoidance. Security priming is an experimental manipulation aimed at boosting felt security. Using a randomized, mixed design, we measured differences in attentional vigilance toward angry and neutral faces as a function of priming (neutral vs. secure) and attachment avoidance. Individuals high in avoidance habitually tend to withdraw from, or otherwise dismiss, emotionally salient stimuli. Here, we operationalized attentional withdrawal based on both task performance in the dot-probe task and microsaccadic movements. In addition, unlike previous studies where priming salience for the individual participant has been unclear, we used a standardized narrative method for attachment script assessment, securing an indication of how strongly each participant was primed. Dot-probe data significantly captured the link between avoidance and attentional disengagement, though from all facial stimuli (angry and neutral). Although microsaccadic movements did not capture avoidant attentional disengagement, they positively correlated to dot-probe data suggesting measurement convergence. Avoidance was associated with weaker security priming and no overall effect of priming on attention was found, indicating a need for further exploration of suitable priming methods to bypass avoidant deactivation. Our results provide a first indication that, as an implicit looking measure, microsaccadic movements can potentially reveal where early attention is directed at the exact moment of stimulus presentation.

Food Attention Bias: appetite comes with eating

Objective Cognitive interventions may be effective in weight loss. The purpose of this study was to assess if cognitive reappraisal (CR; reframing the meaning of a stimulus in order to change the resulting emotional response), can reduce food attentional bias (FAB) using the Visual Dot Probe (VDP) paradigm. Method 126 participants (age 27 ± 5.8) were randomly assigned either to a CR or to a control (CN) group. After assessing baseline VDP levels for FAB, participants either wrote sentences that discourage eating fattening food or neutral sentences. Next, all participants performed the VDP post intervention. Participants also self-reported on disordered eating behaviors and their height and weight were charted. We hypothesized that CR would reduce FAB and that disordered eating would moderate the association between group and FAB. Results FAB decreased post intervention, specifically in the CR group. The bulimia sub-scale showed an interaction between bulimic eating, time and group. Among those who were high on the bulimia scale, the CR group showed lower FAB post-intervention compared to the CN group. Discussion This study suggests that CR may decrease the attentional bias toward high-calorie food compared to other strategies in the general population and among people with high bulimia measures, in particular. Plain English summary Obesity has a negative impact on many aspects of life and much research is dedicated to trying to better understand behaviors concerning obesity. People are prone to focus their attention on things that are of importance to them, such as food. When people focus their attention on food, we call this Food Attention Bias (FAB). Cognitive reappraisal (CR) interventions involve the person's conscious cognitive change of the meaning of the situation aiming to consequently change the emotional response to it, such as saying to yourself “I shouldn’t eat this because I don’t want to get fat”. CR has been found to be helpful in lowering FAB using brain imagining techniques but has not yet been studied in cognitive processes. Our study used a Visual dot probe paradigm (VDP) to assess the efficacy of CR on lowering FAB. Two groups, one using CR and a control group were assessed twice on FAB, using the VDP paradigm. Compared to the normal condition, the CR intervention helped reduce FAB. This reduction was especially significant for people with a higher tendency for bulimic behavior. The VDP paradigm, utilizing CR. can be expanded to help build an intervention aimed at reducing FAB over time. This, in turn might bring to weight reduction. People with bulimic tendencies might especially benefit from CR interventions when dealing with weight loss.