Top-down attention and selection history in psychopathy: Evidence from a community sample

Psychopathy is a severe personality disorder, the core of which pertains to callousness, an entitled and grandiose interpersonal style often accompanied by impulsive and reckless endangerment of oneself and others. The response modulation theory of psychopathy states that psychopathic individuals have difficulty modulating top-down attention to incorporate bottom-up stimuli that may signal important information but are irrelevant to current goals. However, it remains unclear which particular aspects of attention are impaired in psychopathy. Here, we used 2 visual search tasks that selectively tap into bottom-up and top-down attention. In addition, we also looked at intertrial priming, which reflects a separate class of processes that influence attention (i.e., selection history). The research group consisted of 65 participants that were recruited from the community. Psychopathic traits were measured with the Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI; Uzieblo, Verschuere, & Crombez, 2007). We found that bottom-up attention was unrelated to psychopathic traits, whereas elevated psychopathic traits were related to deficits in the use of cues to facilitate top-down attention. Further, participants with elevated psychopathic traits were more strongly influenced by their previous response to the target. These results show that attentional deficits in psychopathy are largely confined to top-down attention and selection history.