Brian A Anderson
Biographic Data
| ID | 5019737 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Brian A Anderson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Brian A |
| FAMILY NAME | Anderson |
| SIGNATURE | ANDERSON B A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Texas A&M University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6620-3703 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
The Attention Habit II: How selection history shapes the strategic control of attention
The allocation of attention is now widely understood to reflect the joint influence of goal-directed, stimulus-driven, and selection history-driven mechanisms of control. The influence of selection history is often discussed in the context of the involuntary control of attention, competing with goal-directed influences. Here, we argue that selection history also influences voluntary, goal-directed mechanisms of control, shaping the manner in whic…
Reward history alters priority map based on spatial relationship, but not absolute location
Does fear conditioning via mental imagery influence subsequent attention
Mental imagery consists in the formation of internal visual representations in the absence of external stimulation. Recent findings indicate that fear conditioning with imagined percepts generalises to the corresponding visual percepts, as measured by skin conductance response and self-reported fear, despite the visual stimulus never being paired with the unconditioned stimulus. The present study aimed to determine whether fear conditioning acqui…
Aversive conditioning, anxiety, and the strategic control of attention
What we pay attention to is influenced by both reward learning and aversive conditioning. Although early attention tends to be biased toward aversively conditioned stimuli, sustained ignoring of such stimuli is also possible. How aversive conditioning influences how a person chooses to search, or the strategic control of attention, has not been explored. In the present study, participants learned an association between a colour and an aversive ou…
Attention Failures Cause Workplace Accidents: Why Workers Ignore Hazards and What To Do About It
Accidents readily occur when workers are not attentive to the hazards of their work. For some professionals, such as workers in the construction and mining industry, exposure to workplace hazards occurs on a daily basis. Such repetitive exposure to workplace hazards poses unique challenges for the attention of workers. This review explores how, in the absence of negative consequences, repetitive exposure to hazards decreases attention to them. Re…
Attribute amnesia as a product of experience-dependent encoding
Observational learning of threat-related attentional bias
Attentional bias to threat has been almost exclusively examined after participants experienced repeated pairings between a conditioned stimulus (CS) and an aversive unconditioned stimulus (US). This study aimed to determine whether threat-related attentional capture can result from observational learning, when participants acquire knowledge of the aversive qualities of a stimulus without themselves experiencing aversive outcomes. Non-clinical you…
Filtering distractors is costly
To find a target in visual search, it is often necessary to filter out task-irrelevant distractors. People find the process of distractor filtering effortful, exerting physical effort to reduce the number of distractors that need to be filtered on a given search trial. Working memory demands are sufficiently costly that people are sometimes willing to accept aversive heat stimulation in exchange for the ability to avoid performing a working memor…
An examination of the motivation to manage distraction
Selection history contributes to suboptimal attention strategies
Statistical learning facilitates the strategic use of attentional control
Instructional learning of threat-related attentional capture is modulated by state anxiety
The present study aimed to determine whether persistent threat-related attentional capture can result from instructional learning, when participants acquire knowledge of the aversive qualities of a stimulus through verbal instruction. Fifty-four nonclinical adults first performed a visual search task in which a green or red circle was presented as a target. They were instructed that one of these two colors might be paired with an electric shock i…
Systemic effects of selection history on learned ignoring
The influence of threat on the efficiency of goal-directed attentional control
Combined influence of valence and statistical learning on the control of attention: Evidence for independent sources of bias
Oculomotor feedback rapidly reduces overt attentional capture
You do it to yourself: Attentional capture by threat-signaling stimuli persists even when entirely counterproductive
Recent research has demonstrated a counterproductive attentional bias toward threat-related stimuli: under conditions in which fixating on a color distractor stimulus sometimes resulted in an immediate shock, participants were nevertheless more likely to look at this threat-related distractor than a neutral distractor matched for physical salience. However, participants in that prior research may not have realized that their own actions caused de…
Supplemental Material for You Do It to Yourself: Attentional Capture by Threat-Signaling Stimuli Persists Even When Entirely Counterproductive
This document describes analyses of gaze dwell time on CS+ and CS-distractor stimuli, and latencies of first saccades towards distractors and targets, in Experiments 1 and 2
Reward learning biases the direction of saccades
How does the attention system learn from aversive outcomes
Learning about aversive outcomes plays a role in the guidance of attention. Classical conditioning generates a bias to predictors of aversive outcomes, whereas instrumental learning potentiates a negatively reinforced avoidance behavior, which can be difficult to dissociate in the case of attention to aversively conditioned stimuli. The present study examined the relative contribution from these two learning processes to the control of attention.…
Motivated suppression of value- and threat-modulated attentional capture
Attention prioritizes stimuli previously associated with reward or punishment. The present study examined whether this attentional bias, widely considered to be involuntary and automatic, could be suppressed with sufficient motivation. Participants performed visual search for a shape-defined target. One color-singleton distractor predicted the possibility of receiving a reward and another an electric shock, with each outcome occurring infrequentl…
Threat reduces value-driven but not salience-driven attentional capture
What we direct our attention to is strongly influenced by both bottom-up and top-down processes. Moreover, the control of attention is biased by prior learning, such that attention is automatically captured by stimuli previously associated with either reward or threat. It is unknown whether value-oriented and threat-oriented mechanisms of selective information processing function independently of one another, or whether they interact with each ot…
On the automaticity of attentional orienting to threatening stimuli
Attention is biased toward stimuli that have been associated with aversive outcomes in the past. This bias has previously been interpreted as reflecting automatic orienting toward threat signals. However, in many prior studies, either the threatening stimulus provided valuable predictive information, signaling the possibility of an otherwise unavoidable punishment and thereby allowing participants to brace themselves, or the aversive event could …
The attention habit: how reward learning shapes attentional selection: The attention habit
There is growing consensus that reward plays an important role in the control of attention. Until recently, reward was thought to influence attention indirectly by modulating task-specific motivation and its effects on voluntary control over selection. Such an account was consistent with the goal-directed (endogenous) versus stimulus-driven (exogenous) framework that had long dominated the field of attention research. Now, a different perspective…
Value-driven attentional capture
Attention selects which aspects of sensory input are brought to awareness. To promote survival and well-being, attention prioritizes stimuli both voluntarily, according to context-specific goals (e.g., searching for car keys), and involuntarily, through attentional capture driven by physical salience (e.g., looking toward a sudden noise). Valuable stimuli strongly modulate voluntary attention allocation, but there is little evidence that high-val…
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Value-driven attentional capture
Attention selects which aspects of sensory input are brought to awareness. To promote survival and well-being, attention prioritizes stimuli both voluntarily, according to context-specific goals (e.g., searching for car keys), and involuntarily, through attentional capture driven by physical salience (e.g., looking toward a sudden noise). Valuable stimuli strongly modulate voluntary attention allocation, but there is little evidence that high-val…
The attention habit: how reward learning shapes attentional selection: The attention habit
There is growing consensus that reward plays an important role in the control of attention. Until recently, reward was thought to influence attention indirectly by modulating task-specific motivation and its effects on voluntary control over selection. Such an account was consistent with the goal-directed (endogenous) versus stimulus-driven (exogenous) framework that had long dominated the field of attention research. Now, a different perspective…
Threat reduces value-driven but not salience-driven attentional capture
What we direct our attention to is strongly influenced by both bottom-up and top-down processes. Moreover, the control of attention is biased by prior learning, such that attention is automatically captured by stimuli previously associated with either reward or threat. It is unknown whether value-oriented and threat-oriented mechanisms of selective information processing function independently of one another, or whether they interact with each ot…
On the automaticity of attentional orienting to threatening stimuli
Attention is biased toward stimuli that have been associated with aversive outcomes in the past. This bias has previously been interpreted as reflecting automatic orienting toward threat signals. However, in many prior studies, either the threatening stimulus provided valuable predictive information, signaling the possibility of an otherwise unavoidable punishment and thereby allowing participants to brace themselves, or the aversive event could …
Reward learning biases the direction of saccades
How does the attention system learn from aversive outcomes
Learning about aversive outcomes plays a role in the guidance of attention. Classical conditioning generates a bias to predictors of aversive outcomes, whereas instrumental learning potentiates a negatively reinforced avoidance behavior, which can be difficult to dissociate in the case of attention to aversively conditioned stimuli. The present study examined the relative contribution from these two learning processes to the control of attention.…
Motivated suppression of value- and threat-modulated attentional capture
Attention prioritizes stimuli previously associated with reward or punishment. The present study examined whether this attentional bias, widely considered to be involuntary and automatic, could be suppressed with sufficient motivation. Participants performed visual search for a shape-defined target. One color-singleton distractor predicted the possibility of receiving a reward and another an electric shock, with each outcome occurring infrequentl…
The influence of threat on the efficiency of goal-directed attentional control
Combined influence of valence and statistical learning on the control of attention: Evidence for independent sources of bias
Oculomotor feedback rapidly reduces overt attentional capture
You do it to yourself: Attentional capture by threat-signaling stimuli persists even when entirely counterproductive
Recent research has demonstrated a counterproductive attentional bias toward threat-related stimuli: under conditions in which fixating on a color distractor stimulus sometimes resulted in an immediate shock, participants were nevertheless more likely to look at this threat-related distractor than a neutral distractor matched for physical salience. However, participants in that prior research may not have realized that their own actions caused de…
Supplemental Material for You Do It to Yourself: Attentional Capture by Threat-Signaling Stimuli Persists Even When Entirely Counterproductive
This document describes analyses of gaze dwell time on CS+ and CS-distractor stimuli, and latencies of first saccades towards distractors and targets, in Experiments 1 and 2
Systemic effects of selection history on learned ignoring
Selection history contributes to suboptimal attention strategies
Statistical learning facilitates the strategic use of attentional control
Instructional learning of threat-related attentional capture is modulated by state anxiety
The present study aimed to determine whether persistent threat-related attentional capture can result from instructional learning, when participants acquire knowledge of the aversive qualities of a stimulus through verbal instruction. Fifty-four nonclinical adults first performed a visual search task in which a green or red circle was presented as a target. They were instructed that one of these two colors might be paired with an electric shock i…
Attention Failures Cause Workplace Accidents: Why Workers Ignore Hazards and What To Do About It
Accidents readily occur when workers are not attentive to the hazards of their work. For some professionals, such as workers in the construction and mining industry, exposure to workplace hazards occurs on a daily basis. Such repetitive exposure to workplace hazards poses unique challenges for the attention of workers. This review explores how, in the absence of negative consequences, repetitive exposure to hazards decreases attention to them. Re…
Attribute amnesia as a product of experience-dependent encoding
Observational learning of threat-related attentional bias
Attentional bias to threat has been almost exclusively examined after participants experienced repeated pairings between a conditioned stimulus (CS) and an aversive unconditioned stimulus (US). This study aimed to determine whether threat-related attentional capture can result from observational learning, when participants acquire knowledge of the aversive qualities of a stimulus without themselves experiencing aversive outcomes. Non-clinical you…
Filtering distractors is costly
To find a target in visual search, it is often necessary to filter out task-irrelevant distractors. People find the process of distractor filtering effortful, exerting physical effort to reduce the number of distractors that need to be filtered on a given search trial. Working memory demands are sufficiently costly that people are sometimes willing to accept aversive heat stimulation in exchange for the ability to avoid performing a working memor…
An examination of the motivation to manage distraction
Reward history alters priority map based on spatial relationship, but not absolute location
Does fear conditioning via mental imagery influence subsequent attention
Mental imagery consists in the formation of internal visual representations in the absence of external stimulation. Recent findings indicate that fear conditioning with imagined percepts generalises to the corresponding visual percepts, as measured by skin conductance response and self-reported fear, despite the visual stimulus never being paired with the unconditioned stimulus. The present study aimed to determine whether fear conditioning acqui…
Aversive conditioning, anxiety, and the strategic control of attention
What we pay attention to is influenced by both reward learning and aversive conditioning. Although early attention tends to be biased toward aversively conditioned stimuli, sustained ignoring of such stimuli is also possible. How aversive conditioning influences how a person chooses to search, or the strategic control of attention, has not been explored. In the present study, participants learned an association between a colour and an aversive ou…
The Attention Habit II: How selection history shapes the strategic control of attention
The allocation of attention is now widely understood to reflect the joint influence of goal-directed, stimulus-driven, and selection history-driven mechanisms of control. The influence of selection history is often discussed in the context of the involuntary control of attention, competing with goal-directed influences. Here, we argue that selection history also influences voluntary, goal-directed mechanisms of control, shaping the manner in whic…
Cognitive psychology (23 works) · Psychology (23 works) · Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies (22 works) · Cognition (16 works) · Neuroscience (16 works) · Social Psychology (11 works) · Attentional bias (10 works) · Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive Processes (8 works) · Visual Search (8 works) · Attentional control (7 works)