Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 2, 2026
Measuring Attentional Biases for Threat in Children and Adults
Published on: October 19, 2014
Eye movements and behavioral responses to threatening and nonthreatening stimuli during visual search in phobic and
Wolfgang H R Miltner1, Silke Krieschel, Holger Hecht
1Department of Biological and Clinical Psychology, Institute of Psychology, Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena, Jena, Germany. miltner@biopsy.uni-Jena.de
Abstract:
Spider-phobic and nonphobic subjects searched for a feared/fear-relevant (spider) or neutral target (mushroom) presented in visual matrices of neutral objects (flowers). In half of the displays, the mushroom target was paired with a spider distractor, or a spider target was paired with a mushroom distractor. Although all subjects responded faster to the neutral target than to the feared/fear-relevant target, phobics were slower to respond than nonphobics when a mushroom target was presented with a spider distractor. Their eyes appeared to be drawn to the feared distractor before fixating neutral targets. A further experiment indicated no group differences when subjects merely judged the homogeneity of matrices. Thus, threat seems to capture the attention of phobics only when it is part of a background that subjects are explicitly instructed to ignore.
