Inhibition of Return in Fear of Spiders: Discrepant Eye Movement and Reaction Time Data

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Ophthalmology Volume 2014, Article ID 183924, 8 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/183924 Research Article Inhibition of Return in Fear of Spiders: Discrepant Eye Movement and Reaction Time Data Elisa Berdica, Antje B. M. Gerdes, Andre Pittig, and Georg W. Alpers Department of Psychology, Clinical and Biological Psychology and Psychotherapy, School of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim, L13, 15-17, 68131 Mannheim, Germany Correspondence should be addressed to Georg W. Alpers; Received 11 November 2013; Accepted 12 May 2014; Published 3 July 2014 Academic Editor: Gernot Horstmann Copyright © 2014 Elisa Berdica et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Inhibition of return (IOR) refers to a bias against returning the attention to a previously attended location. As a foraging facilitator it is thought to facilitate systematic visual search. With respect to neutral stimuli, this is generally thought to be adaptive, but when threatening stimuli appear in our environment, such a bias may be maladaptive. This experiment investigated the influence of phobia-related stimuli on the IOR effect using a discrimination task. A sample of 50 students (25 high, 25 low in spider fear) completed an IOR task including schematic representations of spiders or butterflies as targets. Eye movements were recorded and to assess discrimination among targets, participants indicated with button presses if targets were spiders or butterflies. Reaction time data did not reveal a significant IOR effect but a significant interaction of group and target; spider fearful participants were faster to respond to spider targets than to butterflies. Furthermore, eye-tracking data showed a robust IOR effect independent of stimulus category. These results offer a more comprehensive assessment of the motor and oculomotor factors involved in the IOR effect. 1. Introduction We have a limited capacity to process all of the visual information that enters our visual field at any point in time. For this reason, selective attention to salient stimuli is necessary as it helps us decide where to move our eyes next [1]. In this regard, our attentional system enhances the processing of relevant information and diminishes the processing of less relevant information. This preferential detection can be visible in healthy individuals [2] but it is particularly enhanced in anxiety-prone individuals who are vigilant in detecting threat [3–7] and show disengagement deficits later on [7]. This quick detection of threat is evolutionary adaptive; however, when it interferes with everyday activities and generalizes to neutral stimuli, it can exacerbate the individual’s anxious state [8]. When studying attentional biases and inhibitory processes, a relevant phenomenon is inhibition of return (IOR). This refers to an attentional bias against returning the attention to a previously attended location. It was first demonstrated by Posner and Cohen [9] in a spatial cueing paradigm. They presented participants a cue and subsequently a target which appeared in the cued or uncued location. Participants had to press a button when the target appeared. They found a facilitation effect for short stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs—the time between the presentation of the cue and the start of the presentation of the target) and an inhibitory aftereffect for longer SOAs (300–3000 ms). Facilitation refers to shorter reaction times to valid trials in comparison to invalid trials for short SOAs (0–300 ms SOA) while inhibition refers to longer reaction times to valid trials in comparison to invalid trials for longer SOAs (300–3000 ms). This inhibitory aftereffect suggests that more time is needed to redirect the attentional system to previously attended than to unattended locations. Its function is considered to be a foraging facilitator and is thought to help optimize visual search [10]. An increased likelihood to inspect new areas is adaptive when it comes to finding food or possible sources of threat. This mechanism suggests that search would not be efficient if we kept returning to locations that were inspected before. Research on IOR is scant in clinical psychology but may be particularly relevant to anxiety disorders. This delayed response to previously attended locations may be less adaptive when individuals have to detect a threatening target. 2 Inhibition of threatening information and facilitation of positive information would be a more plausible behavior. For this reason, recent research has started to examine the question whether threatening stimuli can actually interrupt this phenomenon when it is adaptive to pay attention to a fear-evoking cue and not just inhibit its processing. This would be in line with an evolutionary perspective. Until now, however, IOR has been shown to be very robust, nonflexible, even when emotional stimuli were used as cues [11–13]. In a study which employed a simple detection task, we were also unable to find a reduced IOR effect for spider cues and targets, in comparison to butterflies in a high spider fearful group [14]. On the other side, some studies seem to suggest that IOR is not completely immune and can be interrupted in some anxiety-related emotional states such as obsessive compulsive disorder [15], trait anxiety [16–18], and worry [19]. Previous work has mainly involved detection tasks; participants were instructed to press a button to localize the target. In their everyday life people are, however, faced with the need to discriminate and make judgments among a huge variety of stimuli. Therefore, the use of discrimination tasks may be more suitable when it comes to the processing of these emotional stimuli. Such discrimination tasks are used widely in the study of IOR and there is an ongoing debate concerning the time course of the IOR effect in discrimination. Lupiáñez and colleagues [20] argued that in a discrimination task the IOR effect appears later and disappears sooner in comparison to simple detection tasks. When combining discrimination and pictorial stimuli, we are aware of only one previous study which used biologically relevant stimuli in a discrimination task [11]. Taylor and Therrien based the discrimination on the identity of the target (discrimination among face and nonface targets). In the first two experiments they found a larger IOR effect for face targets in comparison to nonface targets when the target was made task relevant. In a third experiment the IOR effect for face targets emerged later than for nonface targets, suggesting that additional processing time may be needed when a task-relevant face target is presented. In their study eye movements were not prohibited. While constraining the eye movements is common for IOR tasks, one could argue tha (...truncated)