The Deficits In Attention Control Function Of Individuals With Subclinical Obsessive-Compulsive Symptoms Of Contamination Fears And The Attentional Bias Modification Facilitates Their Attention Control Mechanisms

Obsessive compulsive disorder(OCD)is characterized by recurrent and painful intrusive thinking and repeated,ritualized behaviors to ease the anxiety caused by intrusion.The difficulty in suppressing irrelevant information manifests itself as obsessive thinking and compulsive behavior.Cognitive neuroscience researches have shown that Frontal-Striatothalamo-cortical circuit abnormalities are the key inhibitory control deficits,particularly the orbito-frontal cortex(OFC)and anterior cingulate cortex(ACC)are closely associated with the function of inhibitory attentional control.From the cognitive inhibition perspective,obsessive-compulsive patients concentrate most of their attention on clues related to their symptoms,limiting their ability to ignore irrelevant information while observing relevant information.Obsessive-compulsive symptoms may be caused by the abnormality of attention control,that is to say,the impairment of the ability to transfer attention from irrelevant information.However,there are still some inconsistencies in the relationship between OCD and attention control function.Some studies have found that individuals with OCD have deficits in attention control,whilesome studies have not.The cognitive neural theory of attention proposes two kinds of attention signals that determine the selective attention to threat stimuli:(1)The vigilance hypothesis suggests that individuals with OCD may be overly sensitive/hypervigilant towards obsession-related stimuli,exhibiting a‘lowered perceptual threshold' for identifying and attending to OCD-related materials.(2)the delayed disengagement/maintenance hypothesis asserts that individuals with OCD do not have an enhanced hypervigilance or initially orientate more quickly towards OCD stimuli.Rather,individuals with OCD have problems either disengaging from the stimuli or overly fixating upon them at later processing stages.Therefore,a paradigm that can measure the independent functional networks between individual attentions is needed to further investigate whether the obsessive symptoms are really caused by attention control deficits.In study 1,attention network paradigm was used and the Flanker arrow materials were replaced with a directional OCD-relevant contamination images to investigate the function of attention network of obsessive-compulsive tendency individuals with contamination concerns.We hypothesize that:(1)individuals with high obsessive-compulsive tendency of contamination concerns(HOC)contend to have significantly lower efficiency in executive control network than individuals with low obsessive-compulsive tendency of contamination concerns(LOC).(2)It is also necessary to investigate whether HOC and LOC have differences in the efficiency of attention alerting network and attention orienting network.Considering the severity of obsessive-compulsive disorder and its advert effects on subsequent individual functions,prevention and early intervention are very important.In recent years,a large number of studies have begun to explore the effect of attention bias modification(ABM)on individual attention control.The purpose of the ABM task is to reduce the excessive allocation of cognitive resources with OCD-relevant information.Based on this important cognitive process,the ABM task may be an effective intervention method for alleviating OCD symptoms and alleviating emotional reactions.In study 2,we used a modified probe detection paradigm to examine the effect of attention training on OCD attention control.We adopted the contamination threat and neural images using the top-bottom presentation and eight-session ABM training(1-2 times in two weeks)to investigate the effect of attention training on the attention control function of HOC.We hypothesized that :(1)ABM training promotes HOC to disengagement from the OCD contamination-related stimuli;(2)ABM training promotes the efficiency of executive control of HOC in ANT tasks;(3)After ABM training,the levels of HOC's anxiety and depression will be decreased.We found that(1)there is a deficit in the executive control network in HOC;(2)ABM training will cause a significant reduction in attention bias for OCD contamination-threat in HOC and promote to disengagement their attention away from OCD-relevant stimuli;(3)ABM training does have a training effect on attention control function of HOC;(4)ABM training shows no promotion effect on the level of anxiety and depression of HOC.In summary,this study verified that HOC has the deficits in attention control network and ABM training will facilitate their attention control function,but ABM training would not enhance the the level of anxiety and depression of HOC.