Enhanced Attentional Bias Variability in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and its Relationship to More General Impairments in Cognitive Control.
Enhanced Attentional Bias Variability in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and its Relationship to More General Impairments in Cognitive Control.
复制标题
创伤后应激障碍中注意力偏差变异性的增强及其与认知控制中更普遍的损害的关系。
DOI：
10.1038/s41598-017-15226-7
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发表时间：
2017
影响因子：
4.6
通讯作者：
Ashley,Victoria
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Swick,Diane;Ashley,Victoria
对威胁的高度警惕是创伤后应激障碍（PTSD）的典型特征之一。这种症状预示着PTSD患者会倾向于注意环境中潜在的危险。然而，设计用于评估视觉空间注意偏差的认知任务显示出不同的结果。一项新的研究表明，注意力偏差不是一种静态现象，而是以面对和远离威胁时的波动为特征的。在这里，我们测试了28名患有创伤后应激障碍的战斗退伍军人和28名对照组退伍军人，让他们用消极中性的词对进行点探测任务。与战斗有关的词和一般否定的词被分成不同的块。重复之前的结果，两组都没有表现出对威胁的关注或远离的偏倚，但PTSD患者表现出更大的注意力偏倚变异性（ABV），这与症状严重程度相关。然而，ABV所指示的认知过程尚不清楚。本研究结果表明，ABV与反应时间（RT）水平的标准差和与认知失败相关的过长RT（前高斯tau）密切相关。这些发现表明，在空间注意中，与威胁相关的偏差无关的反应变异性的总体增加，并支持PTSD中更普遍的认知控制过程的中断。
Hypervigilance towards threat is one of the defining features of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This symptom predicts that individuals with PTSD will be biased to attend to potential dangers in the environment. However, cognitive tasks designed to assess visual-spatial attentional biases have shown mixed results. A newer proposal suggests that attentional bias is not a static phenomenon, but rather is characterized by fluctuations towards and away from threat. Here, we tested 28 combat Veterans with PTSD and 28 control Veterans on a dot probe task with negative-neutral word pairs. Combat-related words and generically negative words were presented in separate blocks. Replicating previous results, neither group showed a bias to attend towards or away from threat, but PTSD patients showed greater attentional bias variability (ABV), which correlated with symptom severity. However, the cognitive processes indexed by ABV are unclear. The present results indicated that ABV was strongly correlated with standard deviation at the reaction time (RT) level and with excessively long RTs (ex-Gaussian tau) related to cognitive failures. These findings suggest an overall increase in response variability unrelated to threat-related biases in spatial attention, and support a disruption in more general cognitive control processes in PTSD.