Saccadic scanpath length: an index for human threat conditioning.

ABSTRACT: Threat-conditioned cues are thought to capture overt attention in a bottom-up process. Quantification of this phenomenon typically relies on cue competition paradigms. Here, we sought to exploit gaze patterns during exclusive presentation of a visual conditioned stimulus, in order to quantify human threat conditioning. To this end, we capitalized on a summary statistic of visual search during CS presentation, scanpath length. During a simple delayed threat conditioning paradigm with full-screen monochrome conditioned stimuli (CS), we observed shorter scanpath length during CS+ compared to CS- presentation. Retrodictive validity, i.e., effect size to distinguish CS+ and CS-, was maximized by considering a 2-s time window before US onset. Taking into account the shape of the scan speed respo

SUBMITTER: Xia Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8367914 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature