Cited by 99Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive ProcessesVisual Attention and Saliency DetectionNeural and Behavioral Psychology Studies

When spiders appear suddenly: Spider-phobic patients are distracted by task-irrelevant spiders

Gerdes, Antje B.M., Alpers, Georg W., Pauli, Paul·2008·Behaviour Research and Therapy

Abstract

Fear is thought to facilitate the detection of threatening stimuli. Few studies have examined the effects of task-irrelevant phobic cues in search tasks that do not involve semantic categorization. In a combined reaction time and eye-tracking experiment we investigated whether peripheral visual cues capture initial attention and distract from the execution of goal-directed eye movements. Twenty-one spider-phobic patients and 21 control participants were instructed to search for a color singleton while ignoring task-irrelevant abrupt-onset distractors which contained either a small picture of a spider (phobic), a flower (non-phobic, but similar to spiders in shape), a mushroom (non-phobic, and not similar to spiders in shape), or no picture. As expected, patients' reaction times were longer on trials with spider distractors. However, eye movements revealed that this was not due to attentional capture by spider distractors; patients more often fixated on all distractors with pictures, but their reaction times were delayed by longer fixation durations on spider distractors. These data do not support automatic capture of attention by phobic cues but suggest that phobic patients fail to disengage attention from spiders.

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Crossref · 10.1016/j.brat.2007.10.010

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Authors
Gerdes, A. B. M., Alpers, G. W., & Pauli, P.
Affiliations
  • University of Würzburg (DE)
  • Bielefeld University (DE)
Corresponding author
Alpers, Georg W.
Venue
Behaviour Research and Therapy
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2008-02
Volume
46
Issue
2
Pages
174-187
ISSN
0005-7967 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2030806929
Cited by
99
References
52
Citations by year
2026: 2 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 4 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 10 · 2020: 2 · 2019: 6 · 2018: 8 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 2 · 2015: 7 · 2014: 7 · 2013: 9 · 2012: 10
FWCI
8.10
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
  • Behaviour Research and Therapy (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • MADOC (University of Mannheim) (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive Processes
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Visual Attention and Saliency Detection
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
Keywords
spider phobia, attentional capture, attentional disengagement, task-irrelevant distractors, visual search, eye movements, fixation duration, reaction time, phobic stimuli
MeSH terms
Adolescent, Adult, Animals, Arousal, Attention, Cues, Female, Fixation, Ocular, Humans, Male, Middle Aged, Phobic Disorders, Psychological Tests, Reaction Time, Saccades, Spiders, Case-Control Studies

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