TY  - JOUR
A1  - Brzezicka, Aneta
A1  - Krejtz, Izabela
A1  - von Hecker, Ulrich
A1  - Laubrock, Jochen
T1  - Eye movement evidence for defocused attention in dysphoria - A perceptual span analysis
JF  - International journal of psychophysiology
N2  - The defocused attention hypothesis (von Hecker and Meiser, 2005) assumes that negative mood broadens attention, whereas the analytical rumination hypothesis (Andrews and Thompson, 2009) suggests a narrowing of the attentional focus with depression. We tested these conflicting hypotheses by directly measuring the perceptual span in groups of dysphoric and control subjects, using eye tracking. In the moving window paradigm, information outside of a variable-width gaze-contingent window was masked during reading of sentences. In measures of sentence reading time and mean fixation duration, dysphoric subjects were more pronouncedly affected than controls by a reduced window size. This difference supports the defocused attention hypothesis and seems hard to reconcile with a narrowing of attentional focus.
KW  - Dysphoria
KW  - Defocused attention
KW  - Eye tracking
KW  - Moving window paradigm
KW  - Perceptual span
Y1  - 2012
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2011.09.022
SN  - 0167-8760
VL  - 85
IS  - 1
SP  - 129
EP  - 133
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  -