Summary: A new study reveals that upsetting distractions significantly impair our ability to sustain attention and also linger more strongly in memory. Researchers tested this by having participants perform a 10-minute visual attention task while emotionally charged images appeared in the background.
Negative images, such as a crying baby, disrupted task performance more than neutral or positive images and were remembered better afterward. These findings provide insight into how emotional distractions interfere with focus and could aid treatments for anxiety and PTSD.
Key Facts:
- Disruption by Emotion: Upsetting distractions cause slower, less accurate performance on attention tasks.
- Memory Bias: Negative distractors are more likely to be remembered than neutral or positive ones.
- Clinical Implications: Findings may help identify attention vulnerabilities in anxiety and PTSD.
Source: Boston University
The world is full of distractions, like intrusive memories, worries about the future and reminders of things to do.
Sustained attention, the ability to maintain focus on a specific stimulus or task for an extended period without significant lapses in concentration, is a foundational cognitive process that underlies many other cognitive functions, impacts daily functioning and is commonly impaired across a diverse population.
While upsetting thoughts and experiences can disrupt one’s ability to focus attention while performing everyday tasks, translating this phenomenon to the laboratory has remained elusive.
In a new study, researchers from Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and VA Boston Healthcare System have shown that when people are sustaining attention, distractions that are upsetting or unpleasant are most likely to disrupt that focus.
The researchers hope these findings will assist in treating anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorders.
“We found that negative distractions disrupted ongoing task performance as well as impacted the participants’ mood by making them feel worse,” explained corresponding author Michael Esterman, PhD, principal investigator in the VA’s National Center for PTSD and BU associate professor of psychiatry.
Two groups of approximately 60 participants performed a series of tasks (called the gradCPT) requiring them to sustain their visual attention for about 10 minutes without a break, while photos of distractions would sometimes fade in and out in the background on a video monitor.
These visual distractions could be upsetting (a crying baby), neutral (a chair), or positive (a smiling baby).
The researchers found that when the backgrounds were upsetting, participants were both slower and less accurate at the sustained attention task. After the task was completed, participants were tested for their memory of the background distractor, even though they were told to ignore these distractors.
They found the upsetting distractors were remembered better than those that were neutral or positive.
“We believe this study will help scientists measure how distractible a person is, what is most distracting to them, and whether those distractions intrude in their memories.
“We also believe it can open new opportunities to study attention in clinical populations and their neural mechanism alongside brain imaging, both of which are directions we are currently pursuing.”
These findings appear online in the journal Behavior Research Methods.
Funding: Funding for this study was provided by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs through a Merit Review Award from the VA Clinical Sciences Research and Development Service (1I01CX002711-01) to J.D and M.E.
About this memory and attention research news
Author: Gina DiGravio
Source: Boston University
Contact: Gina DiGravio – Boston University
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Closed access.
“Characterizing the effects of emotional distraction on sustained attention and subsequent memory: A novel emotional gradual onset continuous performance task” by Michael Esterman et al. Behavioral Research Methods
Abstract
Characterizing the effects of emotional distraction on sustained attention and subsequent memory: A novel emotional gradual onset continuous performance task
This study examines the impact of emotional distraction on sustained attention using a novel gradual onset continuous performance task (gradCPT). Sustained attention is a foundational cognitive process, vulnerable to both internal (endogenous) and external (exogenous) disruptions.
Reliable, validated paradigms to assess internal sources of variation in sustained attention have been used to characterize basic aspects of attention as well as individual differences and neurobiological mechanisms.
However, sustained attention can also be disrupted by external distraction, especially highly salient distractors, due to their affective and/or arousing nature. Markedly less work has been conducted to develop reliable and validated paradigms to study these effects on sustained attention.
This study introduces a novel task, the emogradCPT, to characterize the impact of emotional distractors (background images) on the ability to sustain attention during an emotionally neutral task (digit discrimination task).
Across two experiments and three rounds of data collection, we demonstrate that emotionally negative distractors robustly and reliably disrupt ongoing ability to sustain attention, reflected in reduced accuracy, and slower RTs, relative to neutral, positive, and no distractor conditions.
Further, we validated the task by correlating objective and subjective measures of distraction, as well as demonstrating the impact of these distractors on downstream memory encoding and affect.
Making these data and tools publicly available, we encourage the use of this paradigm to inform future basic, clinical, and neuroimaging studies of affective interactions with ongoing goal-directed attentional processes.
