• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.51-77
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• 2009

Using a modified Posner's cue-target paradigm, we investigated whether negative cues attract more attention than neutral cues in anxious people. Previous studies used commonly an unbalanced proportion of valid and invalid trials(75% vs. 25% respectively). But in the present study, an equivalent proportion of valid and invalids trials was used for measuring detection speed of cues without participant's expectancy caused by the unbalanced proportion. Emotional words(Experiment 1) and facial expressions(Experiment 2) were used as cues for target locations. The result of Experiment 1 and 2 showed that threatening cues facilitated target detection in valid trials and interfered with it in invalid trials in anxious participants and a, reverse response patterns were found in non-anxious participants. This indicates that threatening cues attract more attention to the cued location in anxious people and in contrast, non-anxious people avoid threatening stimuli. In Experiment 3, we investigated the difference of validity effect across anxiety levels. The results showed that anxious participants gave less attention to cued location when the cues were non-informative whereas non-anxious participants gave more attention to cued locations in the same condition. We discussed two kinds of cognitive bias caused by anxiety levels: attentional bias and proportion related bias.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.79-90
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• 2018

The purpose of this study was to investigate the difference of individuals with social anxiety tendency and normal people according to existence of emotional context in attention processing for positive facial stimulation. To do this, we investigated attentional processing for positive face stimuli in a condition without/with emotional context. SADS and CES-D were administered to 800 undergraduate students in D city and the social anxiety group (SA, n=24) and the normal control group (NC, n=24) were selected. In order to measure the two factors of attention process (attention engagement and attention disengagement), first gaze direction and first gaze time were measured through eye-movement tracking. The results show that the SA group exhibited faster attention disengagement from positive face stimuli compared to the NC group in the condition without context. But, when the positive context presented with positive face stimuli, there is no difference between SA and NC. This result suggests that the positive background affects emotional processing of social anxiety disorder.

• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.73-88
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• 2018

The present study examined how processing features of visual information near the hand would affect task switching. Recent studies reported enhanced cognitive control of visual information presented the near hands. To investigate the enhancement of cognitive control based on the relationship between hand proximity and attention, we implemented 2 experiments. In the task switching performance experiment, the hand proximity effect depended on modality of cue and target. The first experiment showed that stimuli near the hand received greater cognitive control than stimuli far from the hand, resulting in smaller switch cost. The result could rule out the feature-binding problem, which identifies reduced switch cost as the cause instead of hand proximity. Our results show that hand proximity actually reduced switch cost. In the second experiment, we examined the effects of hand nearness, modality, and their interaction on switch cost. In task switching, the target was always visual, and the cue was presented either visually or auditorily. In addition, we manipulated the cue-target interval to observe the preparation effect of cue. The results showed that a visual cue near the hand reduced switch cost by shortening task preparation time. Also, modality switching between an auditory cue and visual target was remarkable in a hand-near condition. The results for the visual cue could be interpreted as a benefit of rapid visual attention orienting. On the other hand, the results for the auditory cue could be interpreted as the cost of interference of modality switching by slower attentional disengagement of stimuli near the hands. Finally, modulation of switch cost by attention induced by hand nearness was discussed.