Do Carryover Effects Influence Attentional Bias to Threat in the Dot-Probe Task?

Abstract

Threatening stimuli are often thought to have sufficient potency to bias attention, relative to neutral stimuli. Researchers and clinicians opt for frequently used paradigms to measure such bias, such as the dot-probe task. Bias to threat in the dot-probe task is indicated by a congruency effect i.e., faster responses on congruent trials than incongruent trials (also referred to as attention capture). However, recent studies have found that such congruency effects are small and suffer from poor internal reliability. One explanation to low effect sizes and poor reliability is carryover effects of threat – greater congruency effects on trials following a congruent trial relative to trials following an incongruent trial. In the current study, we investigated carryover effects of threat with two large samples of healthy undergraduate students who completed a typical dot-probe task. Although we found a small congruency effect for fearful faces (Experiment 1, n = 241, d = 0.15) and a reverse congruency effect for threatening images, (Experiment 2, n = 82, d = 0.11) whereas no carryover effects for threat were observed in either case. Bayesian analyses revealed moderate to strong evidence in favor of the null hypothesis. We conclude that carryover effects for threat do not influence attention bias for threat.