(PS14-34) Investigating the Influence of Threat on Selection History and Attentional Biases: An Eye-tracking Approach

Individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are known to exhibit threat-related attentional biases, or heightened responses to threatening stimuli. However, few studies have examined the effect of trauma exposure on attention allocation based on previous experiences (i.e., selection history). We used eye-tracking methodology to explore how attention allocation shifts after threat conditioning in a sample of trauma-exposed (TE; n = 18) and trauma-naïve (TN; n = 19) individuals. Our hypothesis is that TE individuals would exhibit more attentional biases (facilitated threat detection, impaired attention disengagement and attentional avoidance) than TN individuals after undergoing threat conditioning. Before and after completing a virtual reality threat conditioning task, all participants freely viewed 30 matrices of images of conditioned (i.e., threatening) stimuli and unconditioned (i.e., non-threatening) stimuli, while their eye movements were recorded. We found no evidence of impaired attention disengagement. Facilitated threat detection, as measured by first fixation location, was marginally significant (p = .08), and the trend suggested that TE individuals looked at more images of threatening stimuli at their first fixation than TN individuals across matrices after threat conditioning. Although there was a trend approaching statistical significance for attentional avoidance (p = .07), as indicated by the analysis of dwell time on images of stimuli across matrices, the results do not reveal a clear pattern of avoidance. These findings suggest that trauma exposure may contribute to, but not be the sole cause of, attentional biases. The results also underscore the need to identify additional vulnerability markers for preventative interventions for PTSD in the early aftermath of trauma exposure. Additional research is needed to determine if attentional biases manifest later in the etiological pathway for TE individuals who eventually develop PTSD.