Anxiety and Covert Changes of Attention Control

Publisher Summary This chapter presents a research paradigm, which allows the study of covert attentional processes in threatening situations and explores their relationship to the subjective experience of anxiety. These processes mediate changes of attention control beyond awareness by influencing the selective organization of behavior. The contingent negative variation (CNV) is a surface-negative slow potential that arises in the interstimulus interval of a forewarned reaction time task, where a warning signal (S1) precedes an imperative stimulus (S2), to which an overt motor response is required. If the interstimulus interval is shorter than approximately 3 seconds, CNV appears as a continuously rising negativity of up to 20 microvolts that reaches its maximum with the presentation of the imperative stimulus. The Go-Nogo paradigm is also discussed in the chapter. In this paradigm, slow potentials are occasionally recorded in a differential forewarned reaction time task, where two different warning stimuli precede a single second stimulus. The simplest kind of this task requires subjects to press a button in response to the second stimulus only if it is preceded by a high warning tone.