Question

Attention bias is a natural tendency to focus attention toward certain factors during a social interaction. Attention biases have been demonstrated to affect cognitive processes in humans. How do the environment, genetic dispositions, and attitudinal dispositions interact in ways to modify attention biases? Why is this significant in understanding human cognitive processes?

Answer 1

• Attention plays an important role in monitoring one's environment to function effectively.
• Studies on addiction suggest that drug users acquire attentional biases for drug-related objects that lead to highly individualized appraisals of subjectively relevant stimuli.
• Attentional bias can be used to treat people with anxiety helping the person overtly or covertly develop an avoidance response and directs their attention towards non anxiety causing stimuli operating in the environment. Avoidance prevents the anxious person from encountering and processing information that might violate their expectancy of something aversive happening.
• Attentional bias is relevant to many eating disorders as well which could be a result genetic makeup and passed on from parents. Attentional bias can help these people focus their selective attention on stimuli that are not related to body and preoccupation to look thin. The therapy can help them focus their attention towards for example, on pictures of people normally eating,exercising and maintaining a normal weight.
• Attentional bias can also help to modify the negative or stereotypical attitudes held by people which could be culturally based. For example, holding a negative attitude towards a particular community makes the person focus their attention on everything negative to them. By using attentional bias modification program their attention can be diverted towards showing them a positive image of the community in question.
• Attentional biases help us in getting aware about our feelings,the way we think,helps to reflect upon our irrational ideas and try to change them.
• It also helps in dealing with anxiety disorders and substance related disorders by developing safety behaviours through therapy.