Eye movement evidence for defocused attention in dysphoria - A perceptual span analysis
- 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.
| Author details: | Aneta Brzezicka, Izabela Krejtz, Ulrich von Hecker, Jochen LaubrockORCiDGND |
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| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2011.09.022 |
| ISSN: | 0167-8760 |
| Title of parent work (English): | International journal of psychophysiology |
| Publisher: | Elsevier |
| Place of publishing: | Amsterdam |
| Publication type: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Year of first publication: | 2012 |
| Publication year: | 2012 |
| Release date: | 2017/03/26 |
| Tag: | Defocused attention; Dysphoria; Eye tracking; Moving window paradigm; Perceptual span |
| Volume: | 85 |
| Issue: | 1 |
| Number of pages: | 5 |
| First page: | 129 |
| Last Page: | 133 |
| Funding institution: | Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education [N106 017 31/1344] |
| Organizational units: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Psychologie |
| Peer review: | Referiert |
| Institution name at the time of the publication: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Institut für Psychologie |
