Someone’s lurking in the dark: The role of state anxiety on attention deployment to threat-related stimuli

Anxious states can alter attention, impairing goal-directed processing in favor of bottom-up capture. However, it is still unclear whether anxiety-related biases already influence the earliest stage of information processing, especially for unattended threat-related stimuli. Here we tested, using EEG, if the amplitude of the first component of the Visual Evoked Potentials (C1) to simple visual stimuli (either neutral or threat-related) varied depending on anxiety level and task demands. Results showed that anxiety altered goal-directed processing, reducing P300 amplitude to target stimuli, while it increased the C1 to irrelevant stimuli, regardless of their emotional content. Moreover, enhanced load at fixation reduced the amplitude of this component to neutral stimuli, but this early filtering effect was abolished by state anxiety. These results shed light on the time-course of attentional biases in anxiety, confirming that this transient state can enhance bottom-up capture as early as in V1, at the expense of goal-directed processing.