3-005 - Innovations in Eye-Tracking Methodologies to Study Anxiety-Related Threat Biases Across Development

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Researchers have identified aberrant visual attention patterns in early emerging emotional disorders. Visual attention plays a critical in filtering visual information, thereby directly influencing and regulating learning and memory. The use of eye tracking techniques to identify key processes associated with visual attention, as well as its’ plasticity across development, has the potential to improve early detection, intervention, and treatment of various disorders emerging across development. This symposium will highlight three novel eye-tracking paradigms, each examining variations in visual attention across development relevant to anxiety and emotion processing disorders. First, Juvrud and colleagues will describe the relations between maternal anxiety, infant temperament, and the impact of maternal and stranger facial emotions on 9-month olds’ visual search performance. Second, Haas and colleagues examine eye-movement and motor reaction time differences in healthy and clinically anxious children during an emotion priming visual search task. Third, Elison and colleagues will discuss attentional biases during infancy, measured by a modified variant of the traditional Posner spatial cueing paradigm (Mogg & Bradley, 2002). Dr. Dima Amso will conclude the symposium by discussing of the implications and future directions proposed by the symposia speakers.

Sub Unit

• Attention, Learning, Memory

Chair

• Dima Amso, Brown University

Individual Presentations

• Examining the relations between maternal anxiety, and the impact of maternal facial expressions in 9-month-old infants - Presenting Author: Joshua Juvrud, Uppsala University; Gustaf Gredebäck, Uppsala University

• An eye-tracking investigation of the impact of emotion priming on visual search in clinically anxious children - Presenting Author: Sara A Haas, University of Maryland, College Park; National Institute of Mental Helath; Laurel Gordon, University of Maryland, College Park; David Pagliaccio, National Institute of Mental Health; Daniel Pine, 1. Section on Development and Affective Neuroscience, NIMH; Nathan Fox, 3. Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, University of Maryland

• Eliciting an Attentional Bias with Thin Slice Information During Infancy - Presenting Author: Jed T Elison, University of Minnesota; Carolyn Lasch, University of Minnesota; Ralph Adolphs, California Institute of Technology