Poster #21 - The Neural Chronometry of Visual Threat Processing in Adolescents

• In Event: 3-159 - Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Section - Biological Processes: Psychophysiology

Integrative Statement

The present study examined the impact of emotional face primes on attentional processing during visual search, amongst a group of adolescents who varied in symptoms of anxiety (Bacigalupo & Luck, 2015; Grimshaw et al., 2014; Kappenman et al., 2015; Kashiwase et al., 2013; Luck & Hillyard, 1994; Weymar et al., 2013). Along with behavioral responses, the N2pc Event Related Potential (ERP) was measured on the Emotion Priming Visual Search Task (Haas et al, 2016; See Figure 1) to investigate how anxiety symptoms in adolescence (ages 12-17 years) relate to attentional processing. Linear Mixed Effects modeling was employed to examine variability in attention-related processing (indexed by the N2pc ERP) during the visual search as a function of anxiety and prime type, as well as subsequent behavioral performance.
Consistent with prior work (Moran & Moser, 2017; Tsai et al., 2017), we found anxiety-related N2pc variability (F (3, 69.00) = 2.87, p < .05) and behavior (F (3, 119.69) = 3.72, p < .01). In particular, a larger N2pc slope (N2pc change as a function of increasing difficulty) related to slowed response times for high anxious individuals (F (1, 1252.377) = 3.063, p < .05). This interaction was driven by anxiety and N2pc slope differences for the fear prime (t (125.53) = 2.97, p < 0.001) compared to scrambled; no other interactions survived correction for multiple comparisons (Benjamini and Hochberg, 1995). For low anxious adolescents, there was no relation between the N2pc slope for the emotion conditions and subsequent visual search slope. However, for the high anxious group in the fear condition, increased N2pc slope differences (e.g. “larger” and more negative slope values) related to visual search slopes for response time. Specifically, for high anxious adolescents, more negative N2pc slopes during the fear condition, degraded visual search slope, while smaller / less negative slopes facilitated visual search performance. (See Figures 2a & 2b).
The N2pc findings are consistent with prior work both on a non-valenced visual search (Moran & Moser, 2015; Tsai et al., 2017) and emotion-related modulation examined during the dot-probe (Torrence & Troupe, 2017; Holmes et al., 2009; Holmes et al., 2014). Two possibilities have been raised to account for this pattern of findings: first, anxious individuals may use inefficient attentional filters—leading to increased attention in the presence of irrelevant information at the cost of behavioral slowing. Or, this pattern of results may be because high anxious individuals adopt less advantageous attentional mechanisms to inhibit irrelevant items to detect the target, thus using more attentional resources. While the N2pc is generated in extra-striate visual cortex, its’ modulation base on task difficulty is believed to reflect the recruitment of, and communication with, top-down posterior parietal attentional control centers (Fox et al., 2008a; Luck & Hillyard, 1994). In either case, the current study suggests a mechanism by which specific perturbations in the neural basis of attention lead to behavioral disruption to emotional challenges in anxious individuals.

Authors

• Sara A Haas, University of Maryland
  Presenting Author

• George A Buzzell, University of Maryland, College Park
  Non-Presenting Author

• Nathan Fox, University of Maryland
  Non-Presenting Author