Attention moderates the processing of inhibitory information in primary psychopathy

Abstract

Primary psychopathic individuals are less apt to reevaluate or change their behavior in response to stimuli outside of their current focus of attention. According to the response modulation hypothesis, this tendency reflects a lack of responsivity to important peripheral information and undermines adaptive self-regulation. To evaluate this hypothesis, the authors administered a response competition (flanker-type) task and manipulated focus of visual attention. They predicted that psychopathic individuals would display significantly less interference to response incongruent information than nonpsychopathic participants when attention was cued to the target location but display normal interference when there was no prepotent focus of attention. The results confirmed this hypothesis and are consistent with the contention that attention moderates psychopathic individuals' responsivity to inhibitory cues. Implications of this attentional anomaly for psychopathic traits and behavior are discussed.

Figure 1

Examples of the different types of trials. Cue type (endogenous or exogenous) and cue presence (uncued or cued) is indicated in the figure. The trial types are control, congruent, incongruent, and control, respectively. The target stimulus (i.e. the stimulus that the participant is to respond to) is the letter “G” for all of the examples presented here. The timing for each component of the trial (in milliseconds) is listed in the center of the figure. Note that the fixation point appears for a random interval period, between 800–1200 ms. Endogenous cues are presented for 300 ms, while exogenous cues appear for 100 ms.

Figure 2

Graph of mean interference scores for low-anxious non-psychopathic and psychopathic participants (with standard error bars).