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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Mar 20, 2026

Measuring Attentional Biases for Threat in Children and Adults

Measuring Attentional Biases for Threat in Children and Adults

Published on: October 19, 2014

Fear generalization gradients in visuospatial attention.

Emma Wu Dowd¹, Stephen R Mitroff¹, Kevin S LaBar¹

¹Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University.

Emotion (Washington, D.C.)

|May 24, 2016

Summary

Fear learning causes attentional bias toward threats, generalizing beyond conditioned stimuli. This bias extends to similar colors, demonstrating broad defensive generalization of threat assessment.

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Published on: March 18, 2019

Area of Science:

Cognitive Neuroscience
Psychology

Background:

Fear learning is adaptive but requires integration with cognitive processes.
Fear generalization across stimuli is known, but its impact on other cognitive functions is unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how associative fear learning influences visuospatial attention.
To examine attentional bias toward generalized threats after fear conditioning.

Main Methods:

Discriminative fear conditioning using color stimuli.
Visual search task with targets and distractors in perceptually similar colored circles.
Skin conductance responses to validate fear conditioning.

Main Results:

Attention was biased not only to the conditioned color but also to similar, unconditioned colors.
Attentional bias showed a continuous, symmetric generalization gradient based on perceptual similarity.
Skin conductance responses confirmed successful fear conditioning.

Conclusions:

Associative fear learning promotes broad, defensive generalization of attentional bias.
Visuospatial attention is influenced by generalized threat perception.
Findings support functional accounts of fear learning and threat assessment.