Working Memory Guidance of Visual Attention to Threat in Offenders, 2020

Aggression and trait anger have been linked to attentional biases toward angry faces and attribution of hostile intent in ambiguous social situations. Within social-cognitive models of aggression, memory and emotion play a crucial role in the development and maintenance of aggressive and antisocial behaviours. The mechanisms whereby this influence is exerted are not currently understood. Combining a memory task and a visual search task, this study investigated the guidance of attention allocation toward naturalistic faces during visual search by visual working memory (WM) templates. We expected faster reaction times to targets in the visual search display matching WM templates. Given the bidirectional association between WM and attention, this effect would demonstrate that hostile internal representations, prevalent in aggressive individuals, guide attentional resources toward congruent information which in turn reinforces the hostile template. The data were collected from 113 participants who self-reported having served a custodial sentence. Results showed that WM templates guided attention allocation during visual search for naturalistic face targets. Additionally, visual searches were completed faster when holding angry faces in WM regardless of the emotional valence of the visual search target. In line with the social information processing model of aggression, increased aggression and trait anger predicted an increased WM modulated attentional bias. These results demonstrated that internal representations bias attention allocation to threat in participants with a history of deviant behaviour.