Threat of shock increases distractor susceptibility during the short-term maintenance of visual information.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Work on anxiety related attention control deficits suggests that elevated arousal impacts the ability to filter out distractors. To test this, we designed a task to look at distractor suppression during periods of threat. We administered trials of a visual short-term memory (VSTM) task, during periods of unpredictable threat, and hypothesized that threat would impair performance during trials where subjects were required to filter out large numbers of distractors.

Method

Experiment 1 involved fifteen healthy participants who completed one study visit. They performed four runs of a VSTM task comprising 32 trials each. Participants were presented with an arrow indicating left or right, followed by an array of squares. They were instructed to remember the target side

SUBMITTER: Casalvera A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10690351 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature