A cost-benefit approach to motivated top-down attentional control in high anxiety individuals

Cristina Wilson

Trait anxiety is associated with a preferential biasing of attentional resources towards vigilance, increasing the likelihood of identifying threats in the environment, but decreasing the capacity of resources that can be allocated to other goals. As a result, trait anxious individuals tend to be worse at maintaining knowledge and expectations about current goals and using this information to direct behavior and prevent interference from competing goals, i.e., top-down attentional control. For example, trait anxious individuals often have poor performance on laboratory measures which require preventing interference from incompatible response tendencies using contextual information. However, anxiety-differences on laboratory measures are not always found, leading to the prominent theory that trait anxious individuals can flexibly allocate resources from vigilant attention towards top-down control when sufficiently motivated. Recent research conceptualizing the operation of top-down control as a cost-benefit decision may provide a theoretical framework for predicting when trait anxious individuals will allocate resources towards top-down control. According to this framework, top-down control is utilized when the expected benefits outweigh the costs, where the benefit of control is the payoff for good performance in the primary task, and the cost is the depletion of attentional resources available for the performance of other tasks. The goal of the current study was to determine if a cost-benefit framework can predict conditions where trait anxious individuals will be motivated to employ top-down control. The costs and benefits of control were independently manipulated in the Continuous Performance Task, AX version (AX-CPT), a widely used measure of attentional control. High and low trait anxiety participants completed three AX-CPT conditions: baseline, benefit, and cost. High anxiety participants showed worse top-down control in the baseline condition relative to low anxiety participants. However, the benefit condition motivated high trait anxiety individuals to overcome deficits in top-down control and improve to the level of low anxiety participants. This provides support for theories claiming high anxiety individuals will flexibly allocate attentional resources from vigilance towards top-down control if sufficiently motivated, and builds upon existing theories by establishing formal conditions of motivation.

A cost-benefit approach to motivated top-down attentional control in high anxiety individuals

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