The last ten years of attention research have witnessed a revolution, replacing a theoretical
dichotomy (top-down vs. bottom-up control) with a trichotomy (biased by current goals …

Threat-anticipatory defensive responses have evolved to promote survival in a dynamic
world. While inherently adaptive, aberrant expression of defensive responses to potential …

Effective decision-making involves multiple steps to reduce a nearly limitless set of available
choices to a final selection. The attention system plays a critical early role in this process by …

Although humans can voluntarily direct their attention to particular stimuli, attention can at
times be involuntarily allocated to stimuli and such attentional capture can result in …

The control of attention was long held to reflect the influence of two competing mechanisms
of assigning priority, one goal-directed and the other stimulus-driven. Learning-dependent …

Anxiety has consistently been found to potentiate attentional capture by physically salient
stimuli, which could be due to enhanced distractor processing, impaired goal-directed …

Fear conditioning is a significant area of research that has featured prominently among the
topics published in Biological Psychology over the last 50 years. This work has greatly …

Depression is theorized to be caused in part by biased cognitive processing of emotional
information. Yet, prior research has adopted a reductionist approach that does not …

Despite our best intentions, physically salient but entirely task-irrelevant stimuli can
sometimes capture our attention. With learning, it is possible to more efficiently ignore such …

Attention prioritizes stimuli previously associated with reward or punishment. The present
study examined whether this attentional bias, widely considered to be involuntary and …