Anticipation-specific Reliability and Trial-to-Trial Carryover of Anticipatory Attentional Bias for Threat

Concerns have been raised about the reliability of the widely-used dot-probe task. A novel variation, the cued Visual Probe Task (cVPT), uses cues that predict the locations of emotional stimuli. This appears to result in relatively reliable anticipatory attentional bias scores. However, cVPT reliability could be affected by individuals having an attentional bias towards one or the other predictive cue, rather than to predicted stimuli. We provide an improved assessment of this bias. Further, trial-to-trial carryover effects, a source of within subject attentional bias variability previously found for stimulus-evoked biases, were tested. To these aims, a convenience sample of 82 participants was analysed, who performed an online procedure including a reversal of the cue mapping of the cVPT. The predicted stimulus categories were neutral and angry faces. CSIs of 400 and 1000 ms were used based on previous work. An overall anticipatory attentional bias, in terms of RT difference scores, towards threat was found. Reliability was around .4, which was similar to previous results despite the cue reversal procedure. Carryover effects were found with a similar pattern as for non-cued threat-evoked bias. The results confirm a reasonably reliable outcome-focused bias towards threat, showing similar carryover effects as found for stimulus-evoked bias