ABSTRACT

The visual Dot-probe paradigm elicited that anxious patients and control subjects showed a very different pattern of response, the anxious ones having a general inability to maintain attentional focus. Thus, some authors (Fox, 1994) concluded that high anxiety is associated with a general deficit in inhibiting distracting information. It is suggested that this deficit is due by an overactivated amygdala and a lack of GABAergic inhibitory control over the amygdala from the anterior medial structures. To model these processes we have adapted a neural network after the neural network model developed by Houghton and Tipper (1994), model which provides a computational account of negative priming and inhibition of return.

KEYWORDS: anxiety, Dot-probe task, GABA, neural networks, selective attention.