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The impact of threat to visual perception, attention, and cognitive control: A unified vigilance account

威胁对视觉感知、注意力和认知控制的影响：统一的警惕账户

基本信息

批准号：
ES/R003459/1
负责人：
Nick Berggren
金额：
$ 31.07万
依托单位：
Birkbeck, University of London
依托单位国家：
英国
项目类别：
Research Grant
财政年份：
2017
资助国家：
英国
起止时间：
2017 至无数据
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FR003459%2F1
关键词：
impact threat visual perception attention

项目摘要

It is widely accepted that emotion and cognition interact closely, but the precise ways in which they do so are still controversial. There is evidence that experiencing threat or danger causes attention to become hyper-focused, and that the presence of an external threat such as a spider or snake causes a rapid spatial bias towards the source of this threat. However, highly selective attention requires active top-down control mechanisms that guide attention to particular objects and locations. The claim that threat causes our attention to become highly selective is inconsistent with evidence showing that negative emotions of threat, fear, and stress cause impairments in cognitive control, resulting in poor concentration and high distractibility in everyday life. If threat impairs this cognitive control, how can it also result in better control over attentional selectivity? The proposed research aims to resolve this conflict and provide an overarching theory of how threat, both experienced internally as an emotion and externally when seeing threatening objects, impacts our basic perception, attention, and cognitive control. The current project is based on a new unified vigilance theory, which claims that when we experience feelings of threat or danger, our mental processes adapt in a number of key ways. Firstly, because we feel in danger, we attempt to maximize our visual processing to try to detect an external threat or aggressor. Typically, our visual world contains many task-irrelevant objects (e.g., looking at a stop sign while driving, while trying to ignore the birds, the helicopter overhead, the billboards, etc) that have to be ignored ("filtered out") so that only the information that is currently relevant is prioritized. When experiencing threat or danger, our incentives change towards processing as much as information as possible in order to detect any potential threat that may occur. As a result, our perceptual sensitivity is increased, so that more information is processed in better detail than usually. Furthermore, cognitive control is suppressed, thus inhibiting filtering mechanisms that typically act to prevent irrelevant information from being processed. As a result, our sensitivity improves - we are better able to process more information but, at the same time, we are much more prone to the negative effects of distraction by irrelevant information. This highlights the role of threat in cognition: our response to threat is adaptive when the likelihood of an external danger is real. However, when our feelings of threat and fear are not warranted, our response is maladaptive, resulting in an inability to concentrate and ignore distractions effectively. I aim to establish this theory of threat by manipulating internal and external emotion in studies examining perceptual and attentional abilities. Participants will be primed to experience acute feelings of threat, such as completing a task where they occasionally receive a mild electric shock or loud noise presented over headphones. Their ability to process multiple objects, and their ability to ignore salient distractions will be assessed, both in general situations with non-threatening objects and in situations where some objects are emotional (e.g., angry faces). This work will elucidate how threat impacts our daily activities, and both its positive and negative consequences, depending on context. Finally, a key aim of this research is to show how these basic mechanisms can help us understand the difficulties and symptoms experienced by individuals characterized by high levels of perceived threat and anxiety (e.g., anxiety disorders or general high anxious personality). Understanding how threat affects our perception, attention, and cognitive control can inform improved therapeutic interventions designed to treat individuals whose high levels of fear and anxiety have led to ingrained maladaptive responses that impair their daily life.

人们普遍认为，情感和认知密切互动，但它们之间的确切方式仍然存在争议。有证据表明，经历威胁或危险会导致注意力变得高度集中，而外部威胁（如蜘蛛或蛇）的存在会导致对威胁来源的快速空间偏见。然而，高度选择性的注意力需要主动的自上而下的控制机制来引导注意力到特定的物体和位置。威胁使我们的注意力变得高度选择性的说法与证据不一致，证据表明威胁、恐惧和压力等负面情绪会导致认知控制受损，导致日常生活中的注意力不集中和高度分心。如果威胁削弱了这种认知控制，它又如何能更好地控制注意力选择性呢？提出的研究旨在解决这一冲突，并提供一个总体理论，即当看到具有威胁性的物体时，威胁是如何影响我们的基本感知、注意力和认知控制的，无论是内部的情感还是外部的。目前的项目是基于一种新的统一警戒理论，该理论声称，当我们感受到威胁或危险时，我们的心理过程会以多种关键方式进行调整。首先，因为我们感到危险，我们试图最大化我们的视觉处理，试图检测外部威胁或侵略者。通常，我们的视觉世界包含许多与任务无关的对象（例如，在开车时看着一个停车标志，同时试图忽略鸟，头顶的直升机，广告牌等），必须忽略（“过滤”），以便只优先考虑当前相关的信息。当遇到威胁或危险时，我们的动机会转变为处理尽可能多的信息，以便发现任何可能发生的潜在威胁。因此，我们的感知灵敏度提高了，因此比平时更详细地处理了更多的信息。此外，认知控制被抑制，从而抑制过滤机制，通常作用是防止不相关的信息被处理。结果，我们的敏感度提高了——我们能够更好地处理更多的信息，但与此同时，我们更容易受到无关信息分散注意力的负面影响。这突出了威胁在认知中的作用：当外部危险的可能性真实存在时，我们对威胁的反应是适应性的。然而，当我们的威胁和恐惧的感觉没有根据时，我们的反应是不适应的，导致无法集中注意力，有效地忽略干扰。我的目标是通过在研究知觉和注意能力的研究中操纵内部和外部情绪来建立这种威胁理论。参与者将体验到强烈的威胁感，比如在完成一项任务时，他们偶尔会受到轻微的电击或耳机里传来的巨大噪音。他们处理多个物体的能力，以及他们忽略显著干扰的能力将被评估，包括在一般情况下，没有威胁性的物体，以及在一些物体是情绪化的情况下（例如，愤怒的脸）。这项工作将阐明威胁如何影响我们的日常活动，以及它的积极和消极后果，这取决于环境。最后，本研究的一个关键目的是展示这些基本机制如何帮助我们理解以高度感知威胁和焦虑为特征的个体（例如，焦虑症或一般高焦虑人格）所经历的困难和症状。了解威胁如何影响我们的感知、注意力和认知控制，可以为改进治疗干预提供信息，旨在治疗那些高度恐惧和焦虑导致根深蒂固的适应不良反应，损害他们日常生活的个人。