Behavioral Inhibition Significantly Relates to Attentional Orienting to High Social Threat in Kindergarteners.

• In Event: Beyond the Dot Probe: Innovations in Measuring Affect-Biased Attention Across Development

Abstract

An attentional bias to threat is considered a hallmark of temperamental Behavioral Inhibition (BI; Szpunar & Young, 2012), and a moderator of a BI child’s risk for maladaptation in development (Pérez-Edgar et al., 2011). However, most research on affective attentional biases is constrained to computer screens, lacking ecological validity. Moreover, attention is a dynamic process where gaze patterns may change over the course of an exposure. Nonetheless, a majority of research focuses on momentary presentations of stimuli and uses “summary statistics” indexing attention as a static averaged score. Finally, research has emphasized attention to initial exposure to threat and neglected to investigate differences in how an individual may recover from exposure. Recent work (Henderson & Wilson, 2017) postulates that a protracted return to baseline after attention is drawn to threatening stimuli may potentiate negative affect and in turn increase anxious symptomology. Thus, understanding the time course of attention to threat in BI children, both in orienting and after exposure, may help understand mechanisms by which BI may predict maladaptation in development.
In a sample of 45 children ranging from 5-7 years (Mage = 6.15 years, SD = 0.64, 51.1% female, 91.1% White) oversampled for BI, we used mobile eye-tracking to examine attention to an experimenter wearing a “scary” gorilla mask. In this task, sampled from the Preschool Lab-TAB, the child enters a room with an experimenter wearing a gorilla mask standing in the corner and their back to the child. The experimenter turns around revealing the mask, approaches the child, and removes the mask, then inviting the child to touch it. Mobile eye-tracking data were recorded through the episode. Proportion of gaze to the stranger was computed on a second-by-second basis.
Two conditional growth models were used to examine how level of BI related to trajectories over each task phase - the initial exposure (experimenter wearing mask) as well as recovery from the exposure (removal of mask, subsequent interactions). A quadratic curve was deemed the best fit for each model. We found that during the initial exposure to the mask there was a positive association between level of BI and proportion of gaze allocated to the stranger over time (b = 0.02, p < .05, table/figure 1). However, we found that level of BI did not significantly influence the trajectory of attention over time during the recovery period (table/figure 1). Forthcoming analyses will use behavioral measures of fear for each child throughout the episode to examine associations with gaze patterns. Taken together, these findings suggest visual orienting to this high-threat scenario follows a non-linear trajectory for children regardless of level of BI. They also suggest that visual orienting is related to BI during acute threat exposure, but BI does not significantly relate to how attentional patterns may change after the level of threat is mitigated within this context.

Authors

• Kelley E Gunther, Yale University
  Presenting Author

• Kayla Melissa Brown, Advocates for Human Potential
  Non-Presenting Author

• Xiaoxue Fu, University of South Carolina
  Non-Presenting Author

• Leigha Alexandra MacNeill, Northwestern University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Briana Ermanni, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Koraly Elisa Perez-Edgar, Pennsylvania State University, University Park
  Non-Presenting Author