Attention bias contributes to the development and maintenance of test anxiety. However, little is known about the underlying mechanisms of attention bias, such as the relative contributions of the top-down and bottom-up cognitive processes. The bottom-up mechanism selects stimuli based on their physical salience, and regardless of the intention of observers. Besides, it remains unclear whether the attention bias in the test anxiety would extend in the visual search task in which numerous stimuli compete for attentional resources. Thus, the present research investigated these issues by combining the visual search task with eye-tracking techniques. The test-related pictures with varying threat levels may be the visual search target in the task-relevant condition, and be one of the distractors in the task-irrelevant condition. Thirty high and Thirty low test-anxious participants were required to attend a visual search task. Our results found that the low test-anxious group showed greater first fixation proportion and shorter dwell time towards test-related distractor within the target-absent condition. But we cannot find any effects of the high test-anxious group in the task-irrelevant condition. However, both groups showed a faster response and shorter target processing time of the test-related target, and the high test-anxious group had faster first fixation latency and greater first fixation proportion towards the high-threatening test-related target. These results suggested that the high test-anxious individuals showed early vigilance and improved processing efficiency towards the test-related target in a visual search task. Our findings indicated that ABs among numerous stimuli in test anxiety was not a completely bottom-up process.

注意偏见有助于测试焦虑的发展和维持。然而，人们对注意力偏差的潜在机制知之甚少，例如自上而下和自下而上认知过程的相对贡献。自下而上的机制根据刺激的物理显着性来选择刺激，而不管观察者的意图。此外，尚不清楚考试焦虑中的注意力偏差是否会扩展到众多刺激争夺注意力资源的视觉搜索任务中。因此，本研究通过将视觉搜索任务与眼动追踪技术相结合来研究这些问题。具有不同威胁等级的测试相关图片在任务相关条件下可能是视觉搜索目标，在任务无关条件下可能是干扰因素之一。三十名高和三十名低测试焦虑的参与者被要求参加视觉搜索任务。我们的结果发现，低测试焦虑组在目标缺失条件下对测试相关的干扰物表现出更大的第一注视比例和更短的停留时间。但是我们没有发现高考试焦虑组在任务无关条件下的任何影响。然而，两组都表现出对测试相关目标的更快反应和更短的目标处理时间，而高测试焦虑组对高威胁测试相关目标的第一注视潜伏期更快，第一注比例更大。这些结果表明，高考试焦虑的个体在视觉搜索任务中对与考试相关的目标表现出早期的警惕性和提高的处理效率。