Anxiety & inhibition: dissociating the involvement of state and trait anxiety in inhibitory control deficits observed on the anti-saccade task.

The existence of a relationship between heightened anxiety and impaired inhibitory control is well established. However, it remains unknown whether such reduced inhibitory control is a stable characteristic of elevated trait anxiety, is driven by elevated state anxiety, or is a joint function of both trait and state anxiety. The present study sought to resolve this issue, by having high and low trait anxious participants complete an anti-saccade task, following a manipulation of state anxiety level using a video-based state anxiety induction procedure. We found that impaired inhibitory control was interactively determined by trait and state anxiety. Specifically, in high but not low trait anxious participants, the induction of heightened state anxiety served to impair inhibitory control. In addition to shedding light on how inhibitory control may potentially contribute to dispositional anxiety, these findings suggest that the anxiolytic benefits of inhibitory control training procedures may be greatest when delivered to high trait anxious individuals during periods of elevated state anxiety.

Do the eyes have it? A comparison of eye-movement and attentional-probe-based approaches to indexing attentional control within the antisaccade paradigm.

Individual differences in the ability to control visual attention, often termed "attentional control," have been of particular interest to cognitive researchers. This has led to the development of numerous tasks intended to measure attentional control, including the antisaccade task. While attentional performance on the antisaccade task is typically indexed through the recording of eye movements, increasingly researchers are reporting the use of probe-based methods of indexing attentional performance on the task. Critically, no research has yet determined the convergence of measures yielded by each of these assessment methods, nor compared the reliability of these measures. The purpose of the present study was to examine whether antisaccade cost measures yielded by a probe-based adaptation of the task converge with antisaccade cost measures yielded by an eye movement task in the sample of individuals, and whether these alternative approaches have comparable levels of psychometric reliability. Ninety-three individuals completed an eye movement task and a probe-based task at two assessment times, and an index of antisaccade cost was computed from each task at each assessment time. Analyses revealed that the antisaccade cost index yielded by each task demonstrated high internal reliability (eye-movement, rSB = .92; probe-based, rSB = .80-.84) and high test-retest reliability (eye-movement, rSB = .82; probe-based, rSB = .72), but modest measurement convergence (r = .21-.35). Findings suggest that probe-based and eye-movement based antisaccade tasks measure shared variance in attentional control, although their measures do not converge strongly enough to be considered equivalent measures of attentional control.

GIVE me your attention: Differentiating goal identification and goal execution components of the anti-saccade effect.

The anti-saccade task is a commonly used method of assessing individual differences in cognitive control. It has been shown that a number of clinical disorders are characterised by increased anti-saccade cost. However, it remains unknown whether this reflects impaired goal identification or impaired goal execution, because, to date, no procedure has been developed to independently assess these two components of anti-saccade cost. The aim of the present study was to develop such an assessment task, which we term the Goal Identification Vs. Execution (GIVE) task. Fifty-one undergraduate students completed a conventional anti-saccade task, and our novel GIVE task. Our findings revealed that individual differences in anti-saccade goal identification costs and goal execution costs were uncorrelated, when assessed using the GIVE task, but both predicted unique variance in the conventional anti-saccade cost measure. These results confirm that the GIVE task is capable of independently assessing variation in the goal identification and goal execution components of the anti-saccade effect. We discuss how this newly introduced assessment procedure now can be employed to illuminate the specific basis of the increased anti-saccade cost that characterises various forms of clinical dysfunction.