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 be avoided with fast and accurate task performance. Under these conditions, monitoring for threat could be viewed as an adaptive strategy. In the present study, fixating a color stimulus immediately resulted in a shock on some trials, providing a direct incentive not to look at the stimulus. Nevertheless, this contingency resulted in participants fixating the shock-associated stimulus more frequently than a neutral distractor matched for physical salience. Our findings demonstrate that threatening stimuli are automatically attended even when attending such stimuli is actually responsible for triggering the aversive event, providing compelling evidence for automaticity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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关于注意定向到威胁性刺激的自动化。

注意力偏向于过去与厌恶结果相关的刺激。先前已经将此偏见解释为反映了对威胁信号的自动定向。但是，在许多先前的研究中，威胁性刺激提供了有价值的预测信息，预示了否则将不可避免的惩罚并因此让参与者做好准备的可能性，或者可以通过快速准确的任务执行来避免厌恶事件。在这种情况下，监视威胁可以被视为一种自适应策略。在本研究中，固定颜色刺激会立即在某些试验中引起震惊，这直接刺激了人们不看刺激。不过，这种偶然性导致参与者比与身体显着性相匹配的中性干扰器更频繁地固定与电击相关的刺激。我们的发现表明，即使参加威胁性刺激实际上是引发厌恶事件的原因，也会自动参加威胁性刺激，从而为自动化提供了令人信服的证据。（PsycINFO数据库记录（c）2019 APA，保留所有权利）。