Adaptive suppression of threat-history stimuli

The present study investigated whether adaptive suppression mechanisms can be applied to stimuli with a history of threat association. In the experiment, a threat-conditioning task was first used to associate one of two colors—green or cyan—with an electric shock, thereby establishing conditions of threat-history and no-threat-history. Subsequently, in a visual search task, 30 participants reported the orientation of the line inside the target diamond while occasionally being either undistracted or distracted by threat-history or no-threat-history distractors, which appeared across various spatial locations. The results showed that distractors appearing at high-probability locations were effectively suppressed, with suppression being stronger for threat-history distractors than for no-threat-history distractors. These findings indicate that threat history may facilitate visual search through an adaptive attentional suppression mechanism.