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

人们普遍认为，情绪和认知密切相关，但他们这样做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，并且外部威胁（如蜘蛛或蛇）的存在会导致对这种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，将注意力引导到特定的对象和位置。威胁导致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，恐惧和压力的负面情绪会导致认知控制障碍，导致日常生活中注意力不集中和高度分散。如果威胁削弱了这种认知控制，那么它又如何能更好地控制注意力的选择性呢？拟议的研究旨在解决这一冲突，并提供一个总体理论，即威胁如何在内部作为一种情绪和外部看到威胁物体时，影响我们的基本感知，注意力和认知控制。目前的项目是基于一个新的统一警惕理论，该理论声称，当我们经历威胁或危险的感觉时，我们的心理过程会以许多关键方式进行适应。首先，因为我们感到危险，我们试图最大限度地利用我们的视觉处理来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，在驾驶时看停车标志，同时试图忽略必须被忽略（“过滤掉”）的鸟、头顶上的直升机、广告牌等），从而只有当前相关的信息被优先化。当遇到威胁或危险时，我们的动机会改变，尽可能多地处理信息，以检测可能发生的任何潜在威胁。因此，我们的感知灵敏度提高了，所以更多的信息被处理得比平时更详细。此外，认知控制受到抑制，从而抑制了通常用于防止处理不相关信息的过滤机制。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是真实的时，我们对威胁的反应是适应性的。然而，当我们的威胁感和恐惧感没有得到保证时，我们的反应是适应不良的，导致无法集中注意力和有效地忽视分心。我的目标是通过在考察知觉和注意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，例如完成一项任务，他们偶尔会受到轻微的电击或耳机发出的巨大噪音。将评估他们处理多个物体的能力，以及他们忽略显著干扰的能力，无论是在非威胁性物体的一般情况下，还是在一些物体是情绪化的情况下（例如，愤怒的面孔）。这项工作将阐明威胁如何影响我们的日常活动，以及其积极和消极的后果，这取决于背景。最后，这项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水平感知威胁和焦虑为特征的个体所经历的困难和症状（例如，焦虑症或一般高度焦虑人格）。了解威胁如何影响我们的感知、注意力和认知控制，可以为改善治疗干预提供信息，这些干预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、损害日常生活的个体。

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.