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

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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.