A New Cognitive Paradigm For Measuring Attentional Control and Attentional Bias in Children and Adults

Abstract

Biases in attentional processing of threat are a key factor in anxiety disorders (Bar- Haim et al., 2011). Emerging research suggests that prefrontal control mechanisms, such as attentional control, may moderate this attentional bias toward threat in individuals with anxiety (Eysenck et al., 2007). However, the absence of reliable behavioural measures for attentional control and attentional bias, alongside limited sensitivity to developmental changes, has limited progress in understanding their relationship with anxiety.

The aim of this thesis was to address these gaps by developing a novel paradigm adapted from Astle et al.’s (2014) Visual Short-Term Memory (VSTM) task. This paradigm integrates distractor stimuli to assess attentional control and varies the threat level of these distractors to measure attentional bias toward threat. Participants included 115 adults and 15 children (aged 5–14 years).

Mixed-model analyses of trial-by-trial performance revealed that adults with higher levels of anxiety did not exhibit deficits in attentional control, challenging prior findings from subjective self-report measures of attentional control (Shi et al., 2019). Interestingly, adults with higher anxiety improved their performance in trials involving threatening distractors, suggesting an attentional avoidance of, rather than a bias toward, threat. Conversely, children with higher anxiety demonstrated impaired attentional control but did not exhibit significant differences in attentional bias relative to their less anxious peers.

These findings suggest that attentional biases in adults with higher anxiety may stem from adaptive performance strategies rather than underlying prefrontal control deficits. In children, delays in attentional control development may critically influence these strategies. Theoretical implications, methodological advancements, and potential clinical applications are discussed alongside study limitations and future directions.