Anxiety modulates the effects of emotion and attention on early vision

Abstract

At attended locations emotion and attention interact to benefit contrast sensitivity, a basic visual dimension. Whether there are associated costs at unattended locations is unknown. Furthermore, emotion and attention affect response time, and anxiety modulates these effects. We investigated how trait-anxiety influences the interaction of emotion and attention on contrast sensitivity. On each trial, non-predictive pre-cues (neutral or fearful faces) directed exogenous attention to four contrast-varying, tilted stimuli (Gabor patches). Attention was cued toward the target (valid), a distracter (invalid), or distributed over all locations. Observers discriminated target orientation, and completed self-report measures of anxiety. Effects of fearful expressions were mediated by trait anxiety. Only high-trait-anxious individuals showed decreased target contrast sensitivity after attention was diverted to a distracter by a fearful cue, and anxiety score correlated with degree of impairment across participants. This indicates that increasing anxiety exacerbates threat-related attentional costs to visual perception, hampering processing at non-threat-related locations.

Figure 1

Trial sequence. Images not to scale; contrast, target Gabor tilt and spatial frequency emphasized for clarity; spatial position of cues and targets not to scale.

Figure 2

A–D: Cueing effects: all observers and by anxiety. The Y-axis is normalized contrast sensitivity. The X-axis is spatial cueing condition. Black bars indicate fear face cues and white bars indicate neutral face cues. (*) indicates a significant two-tailed t-test. Error bars are ± 1 SE of mean. A) All observers; B) high trait anxious observers; C) middle trait anxious observers; and D) low trait anxious observers.

Figure 3

Gray bars Distribution of anxiety scores across the sample. The Y-axis is the number of participants as a function of trait anxiety score (X-axis). Black circles: Correlation of anxiety score and invalid cue index. The Y-axis is the invalid cue index (fear-invalid minus neutral-invalid normalized contrast sensitivity). A positive number indicates fear-invalid cues benefited contrast sensitivity whereas a negative number indicates they incurred a cost to contrast sensitivity.