Abstract
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.
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Notes
A total of 222 students from Nanjing university volunteered to fill out the TAS-C. The internal reliability coefficients for the present study were acceptable (the TAS-C shows a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of 0.84). In line with conceptual underpinnings of the concept of test anxiety(Sarason, 1978), we used the cut-off scores of TAS-C 20 and above for the HTA and 12 or lower for the LTA group (Dong et al., 2017). In line with this, we obtained 118 participants with 57 (M TAS-C scores = 25.58; SD TAS-C scores =3.91) in HTA and 61 (M TAS-C scores = 8.34; SD TAS-C scores =2.92) in the LTA groups. Overall, 60 participants (30 for each of the groups) attended the final Experiment. Other students were excluded because (1) they did not fill out correct contacts in the form, and /or (2) they refused to participate in the experiment after they know the procedure of the experiments, and /or (3) they appeared to have suffered or still suffer from currently known psychiatric disorders (e.g., depression, bipolar disorder, and substance abuse) as diagnosed (just before the start of this study) by a self-completed Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV.
The amount of missing data (M = 6.37%, SD = 0.056) did not vary as a function of the group, task-relevance and their interaction (max F = 1.51, p = 0.225), but the main effects of stimuli type was marginally significant, F(2, 104) = 2.83, p = 0.063, ηp2 = 0.052, further test found that the differences of missing data between the HTP (M = 6.62%, SE = 0.008), LTP (M = 6.27%, SE = 0.007) and NP condition (M = 6.21%, SE = 0.008) were not statistically significant (ps ≥ 0.13).
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Cenlou Hu designed the experiments; Cenlou Hu and Qiong Huang collected the data and carried out the analyses. Cenlou Hu, Tian Po Oei and Renlai Zhou wrote, reviewed and revised the manuscript. This research was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (202030048) and Nanjing Institute of Minor Mental Health Research (2020ZK-ZK05). The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest. All procedures were in accordance with the ethical principles of human experimentation and with the approval of the ethical committee of the Nanjing University. All participants attended the experiments gave informed consent for participation and publication. The datasets and materials generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Hu, C., Oei, T.P., Huang, Q. et al. Early vigilance and improved processing efficiency to the test-related target in test anxiety: Evidence from the visual search task and eye-movements. Curr Psychol 42, 11661–11673 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02454-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02454-4