Vigilance: A novel conditioned fear response that resists extinction

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Attentional bias for threat is adaptive but can be maladaptive in anxiety disorders.
• Previous research used reaction times for automatic biases and eye tracking for voluntary biases.
• Fear conditioning and learning are increasingly studied for attentional bias acquisition and inhibition.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate overt attentional bias components towards threat and safety cues using eye tracking.
• To examine voluntary gaze biases during fear learning and extinction.
• To understand the extinction properties of vigilance compared to conditioned fear responses.

Main Methods:

• Employed a novel eye tracking paradigm with 78 participants.
• Presented threat and safety cues over 10-second trials.
• Measured pupil size and self-report ratings to assess conditioned fear.

Main Results:

• Threat cues, not safety cues, induced initial orienting and sustained monitoring biases (vigilance).
• This vigilance response to threat cues was resistant to extinction.
• Conditioned fear responses (pupil size, self-reports) demonstrated significant extinction.

Conclusions:

• Vigilance, an overt attentional bias to threat, shows limited extinction compared to autonomic fear responses.
• This resilience may be due to lower energy requirements of eye movements versus defensive behaviors.
• Findings have implications for understanding vigilance in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).