Temporal property in attentional biases towards threat in the dot-probe task

Attention biases towards threatening stimuli over neutral stimuli have been investigated using a dot-probe task. In this task, a pair of stimuli, such as faces with angry and neutral emotions, appears at different spatial locations on a screen. Immediately following the disappearance of the facial stimuli, a dot emerges as the target at one of the two locations: the location for the previously presented negative stimulus (congruent condition) or the location for the previously presented neutral stimulus (incongruent condition). The congruent condition typically results in faster reaction times (RT) compared to the incongruent condition when the duration of the facial stimuli is short (e.g., 200 ms), but slower RT when the duration of the facial stimuli is long (e.g., 1000 ms). These RT differences are thought to reflect vigilance and attention avoidance towards negative stimuli, respectively. Previous studies have examined the effect of duration of the facial stimuli when the target appears immediately following the face stimuli. In contrast, the present study aimed to investigate the temporal properties of attention bias by varying the interstimulus time interval (ISI) between the offset of the facial stimuli and onset of the dot stimulus. In this study, angry-neutral pairs of faces were presented for 100 ms (in Experiment 1) or 200 ms (in Experiment 2), with ISI of 20ms, 200ms, 500ms, and 900ms. The results showed a trend of faster RT in the congruent condition compared to the incongruent condition for the shortest ISI, but a reversal of RT difference for longer ISIs. These findings suggest that vigilance and attention avoidance may be intrinsic temporal properties of attention biases, and that continuous viewing of threatening information is not necessarily required for the effect of attention avoidance. Furthermore, the results are discussed in the context of the classical spatial cueing paradigm.