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International Journal of Psychophysiology 85 (2012) 129–133
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
International Journal of Psychophysiology
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijpsycho
Short Communication
Eye movement evidence for defocused attention in dysphoria — A perceptual
span analysis
Aneta Brzezicka a,⁎, Izabela Krejtz a, Ulrich von Hecker b, Jochen Laubrock c
a
b
c
Interdisciplinary Center for Applied Cognitive Studies, Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, Poland
School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
Department of Psychology, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 13 January 2011
Received in revised form 29 September 2011
Accepted 30 September 2011
Available online 25 October 2011
Keywords:
Dysphoria
Defocused attention
Eye tracking
Moving window paradigm
Perceptual span
a b s t r a c t
The defocused attention hypothesis (von Hecker and Meiser, 2005) assumes that negative mood broadens attention, whereas the analytical rumination hypothesis (Andrews and Thompson, 2009) suggests a narrowing
of the attentional focus with depression. We tested these conflicting hypotheses by directly measuring the
perceptual span in groups of dysphoric and control subjects, using eye tracking. In the moving window paradigm, information outside of a variable-width gaze-contingent window was masked during reading of sentences. In measures of sentence reading time and mean fixation duration, dysphoric subjects were more
pronouncedly affected than controls by a reduced window size. This difference supports the defocused attention hypothesis and seems hard to reconcile with a narrowing of attentional focus.
© 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Classical views on the influence of mood on information processing claim that negative affective states are associated with a narrowing of attention, a more systematic and analytical style of information
processing, in which greater attention is paid to details, and the tendency to focus on one single thought or activity – most often negative
and self-relevant – (e.g. Edwards and Weary, 1993; Gasper and Clore,
2002; Yost and Weary, 1996; review in: Andrews and Thomson,
2009). Some authors see a possible adaptive function of emotional
states in general, and depressed mood in particular. According to
these approaches, negative mood and depression itself is an adaptive
mechanism that has evolved to face complex problems. Its assumed
function is to minimize disruption and to sustain a subsequent analysis of those problems, thereby reducing the desire to engage in other
activities that could be potentially be distracting from the perspective
of the current problem. This approach to information processing in
depression has been labeled as the analytical rumination theory
(AR, Andrews and Thomson, 2009).
In contrast, there is also evidence to show that depressed individuals
may sometimes attend to task-irrelevant information (von Hecker and
Meiser, 2005), as they also often find it difficult to inhibit such information (Hertel, 1997, 1998; Hertel and Rude, 1991; Joormann, 2010). Such
a defocused mode of attention is sometimes regarded as reflecting an
⁎ Corresponding author. Tel.: + 48 605 834 974; fax: + 48 22 517 99 21.
E-mail address: [email protected] (A. Brzezicka).
0167-8760/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2011.09.022
adaptive mechanism which allows for seeking new opportunities or
ways of problem solving, even if these may appear irrelevant or perceptually peripheral at the time. For example, according to the functional
theory of emotion, experiencing sadness may be associated with a “do
nothing and/or search for new plan” state which promotes an open, unselective and low-effort mode of attention (Oatley and Johnson-Laird,
1987) which then allows to perceive and process a greater variety of
stimuli. If depressed mood is associated with defocused attention
(DA), then one should be able to elicit even superior cognitive performance in the depressed as compared to nondepressed people when
asking them about irrelevant aspects of a task that is being processed.
To examine this prediction with respect to memory performance,
von Hecker and Meiser (2005) used a source monitoring paradigm
that allows for separating various components of memory performance, relating to relevant and irrelevant aspects of the materials
learnt. In their study participants had to learn 64 nouns that were
presented individually on a computer screen, on either the left or
the right side of the screen, and each surrounded by either a red or
green frame. Participants were told that they later would be asked
to recognize these 64 words as “old” when randomly presented
amongst 64 distractors. Participants were also instructed to remember the location of each word for later identification. Importantly, participants were not told about remembering the frame color. In the
test stage, however, participants were not only queried about old/
new decisions for each presented test word and, if participants
responded “old,” about the side on which that word had been presented on the screen, but they were asked, additionally, what the
color of its frame had been. This way, for each word they had
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classified as “old,” participants attempted to recall one source dimension that had been relevant (location), and one that had been irrelevant (frame color) at the time of encoding.
Results showed that nondepressed participants' memory for frame
color (irrelevant contextual information) was virtually nil. The depressed group, on the other hand, showed above-chance memory for
this irrelevant stimulus feature. A possible mechanism underling better
performance in the depressed group on tasks such as this may be connected with a different characteristic of the perceptual processes in the
latter group. Maybe depressed people scan the environment in a way
that results in perceiving a wider range of stimuli within the visual
field, but do it rather superficially, as if searching for “something” new,
that is, without any particular purpose — and without paying much attention to details. Hence, a less effective attentional filter could cause,
e.g., more intrusions by irrelevant material into working memory. In
any case, this approach is opposite to the traditional view holding that
cognition in depressed mood is often operating in a local rather than
global mode (e.g. Gasper and Clore, 2002).
To test the hypothesis about a wider scope of attention as a characteristic feature of mildly depressed people we directly measured
the perceptual span during reading, using eye tracking. We were specifically interested in investigating defocused attention during reading. Using a moving window paradigm (McConkie and Rayner,
1975; Rayner, 1998) we assessed the size of the perceptual span,
which in turn informed us about how dysphoric people acquire information during reading tasks.
1.1. Perceptual span
Useful information during reading is probed from a limited region
around the fovea and the term perceptual span is used to denote
this region. Perceptual span is defined as the width of the window
of characters which one is able to attend to at each fixation during
text reading (Rayner, 1975; Rayner et al., 1981; Bullimore and Bailey,
1995). In contrast to visual span, not all of the characters need to be
identifiable within the perceptual span, but their characteristics
(word length, spacing) influence planning and execution of the next
eye movement. The perceptual span is asymmetric (Pollatsek et al.,
1981), and as the decline in visual acuity away from the fovea is
roughly symmetrical, the existence of asymmetry shows that the perceptual span is determined by attentional, in addition to structural, factors. Moreover, this asymmetry is functional as the area covered by the
perceptual span is wider on the right side of the fovea for people
whose reading direction is left to right, and wider on the left side for
people whose reading direction is right to left (Pollatsek et al., 1981).
Additionally, Miellet et al.(2009)showed that the perceptual span in
reading is governed mainly by attentional factors. The size of the
perceptual span (in characters) is typically smaller in languages
such as Chinese with greater information content per character
(1 character to the left, 3 characters to the right for readers of Chinese,
compared to 3–4 characters to the left and 14–15 characters to the right
for readers of English), but is roughly equal in terms of information conveyed, again suggesting that it is also limited by cognitive factors (Inhoff
and Liu, 1998). Finally, the perceptual span can be dynamically modulated according to local processing difficulty. For example, the span
gets smaller when more difficult words are processed (Henderson and
Ferreira, 1990) or when visual search is performed under conditions
with high attentional demands (Pomplun et al., 2001).
the window is seen normally whereas all material outside the window is masked. During reading participants can freely move their
eyes, but the amount of useful information available on each fixation
is thus controlled by the experimental program. The moving window
technique is gaze-contingent, meaning that each time the eyes move,
a new region of text is exposed, while the previously fixated region is
masked. In our experiment, window size was defined in terms of
characters, and characters as well as inter-word spaces outside of
the window were filled with a mask (see Fig. 1 for details).
The logic underlying the moving window technique is that behavioral indicators related to eye movement, such as sentence reading
time (longer), fixation duration (longer), and number of fixations
(more), indicate the degree of processing difficulty. When the window is as large as, or larger than, the region from which the reader
can obtain information, then there should be no difference with
regards to the above indices between the moving-window and a normal, unmasked control condition (Rayner, 1998). The aim of the present study was to test conflicting predictions of the DA and AR
theories about cognitive functioning of depressed individuals on this
basic, perceptual/attentional level. Predictions of the DA theory concerning perceptual span size are quite straightforward: Attention in
depressed individuals works in a defocused mode, allowing for gathering of information from a wider area in comparison to healthy controls. Consequently, in terms of reading times and fixations, depressed
individuals should find the reading task more difficult than nondepressed individuals when spontaneous reading is constrained by the
moving window; and particularly so when the size of that window is
narrow.
In contrast, AR theory claims that depressed or dysphoric people
are characterized by more systematic information processing, implying more focused attention. If this were true we should observe no
differences between dysphoric and control participants, or a narrower perceptual span in the group with depressive symptoms. In
terms of reading times and fixations, dysphoric individuals should
find the reading task less difficult than individuals from the control
group when spontaneous reading is constrained by the moving window, especially when the window is narrow.
2. Method
2.1. Subjects
60 healthy university students (32 women, 28 men, 18–29 years
old) took part in a reading experiment employing the moving window paradigm, after giving informed consent. Participants were
assigned to two groups, control and dysphoric students, according
to their scores on the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI, Beck, 1967).
Target groups were selected from the initial, larger sample (over
100 participants) according to the following criteria: Nondepressed
group — 1 to 5 points in BDI-I, dysphoric group — above 10 points
(these criteria were previously used in, e.g., Hertel and Rude, 1991;
Edwards and Weary, 1993; von Hecker and Sedek, 1999). Characteristics of each group are presented in Table 1. Groups did not differ
in age, but in indicators of depression (besides BDI-I we measured
1.2. Moving window paradigm
The technique most commonly used to assess the perceptual span
is the moving window paradigm as devised by McConkie and Rayner
(1975), in which a region around a fixation point is designated as a
“window” through which one can see the presented text or picture.
As the eyes move, the display is modified so that all material within
Fig. 1. In the moving window paradigm, only the gaze-centered part of a scene or sentence is displayed, whereas the remainder is masked — as illustrated by this example of
the small (1), large (2) and no window (3) conditions. The current fixation position is
marked with “*”.
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131
Table 1
Characteristics of participants.
Age
BDI
ATQ
Depressed (N = 30;
17 women)
Controls (N = 30;
15 women)
M
SD
M
SD
22.07
14.6
72.53
2.63
5.94
19.87
22.87
4.17
46.2
1.81
2.23
10.69
t-Value
(df = 58)
1.37
9.1**
6.39**
**p b 0.001 (with correction for unequal variances); BDI — Beck Depression Inventory,
ATQ — Automatic Thoughts Questionnaire.
the intensity of ruminative thoughts using the Automatic Thoughts
Questionnaire (ATQ), Hollon and Kendall, 1980).
2.2. Apparatus
Sentences were displayed on an LCD monitor running at a resolution
of 1024 × 768 pixels at a refresh rate of 60 Hz. Eye movements were
recorded monocularly with an SR Research EyeLink 1000 eye tracker
at a sampling rate of 1000 Hz.
2.3. Design and procedure
Participants read 120 sentences randomly assigned to four blocks
of trials differing in window size. The order of blocks was counterbalanced between participants. Three different window sizes (6, 12, and
18 characters) were used in addition to a no-window (unrestricted
reading) control condition. Thus, the design was mixed factorial,
with a quasi-experimental grouping factor (dysphoric vs. control)
and a 4-level within-subjects factor (window type).
2.4. Materials
120 easy sentences in Polish were read, 30 per experimental condition. The mean sentence length was 10.4 words (ranging from 7 to
13 words) and 74.1 characters (ranging from 56 to 94 characters per
sentence, including inter-word spaces).
Total sentence reading time, average fixation duration, number of
fixations and average saccade size (amplitude) were treated as dependent variables (for a more comprehensive definition of eye movement measures, see Inhoff and Radach, 1998). Reading time together
with fixations count and average saccade amplitude allowed us to
make inferences about sentence reading strategies. A fixation can be
defined as the period of time between two consecutive rapid eye
movements (saccades). Previous research found that our eyes usually
stop for about 200–300 ms during reading, although fixations from
under 100 ms to over 500 ms may occur (see Rayner, 1998). Fixation
duration as well as fixation count can be treated as indexes of information processing difficulty. By summing up all fixations within one
given sentence, we obtained a total dwelling time, referred to as the
total sentence reading time. Saccade amplitude was measured in degrees of visual angle. Data were preprocessed using SR Research Data
Viewer, then exported to Microsoft Excel for further processing
(merging and averaging) and finally analyzed with PASW Statistics
(SPSS) software.
Fig. 2. Time spent on reading sentences in each window size condition for dysphoric
and control group.
3.1. Sentence reading time
For sentence reading time we obtained a significant window size
effect, F(3, 174) = 72.23, p b .001, eta 2 = .55, and an interaction between window size and mood, F(3, 174) = 4.41, p = .03, eta 2 = .07
(see Fig. 2). Between groups planned comparisons revealed that dysphoric individuals and controls differed in reading time only in the
smallest window size condition, in which the dysphorics were slower
(MD = 8903 ms; MC = 6728 ms; p b .05, LSD test). Both groups read
slowest in the small-window condition, but a within-group comparison showed that only in the dysphoric group was there a marginally
significant difference between the medium and the large conditions
(dysphorics read slower in the medium than in the large condition,
MMEDIUM = 4012 ms, MLARGE = 3600 ms; p = .052).
3.2. Fixation duration
For mean fixation duration, a significant window size effect was
observed, F(3, 174) = 111.57, p b .001, eta 2 = .66, as well as a marginal
main effect of mood, F(1,58) = 3.4, p = .07, eta 2 = .06, and an interaction between window size and mood: F(3, 174) = 5.57, p b .01,
eta 2 = .09 (see Fig. 3 for details). Between-groups planned comparisons revealed a similar pattern of results for sentence reading time,
that is, dysphoric and controls differed in mean fixation duration
only in the smallest window size condition (MD = 292; MC = 259;
p b .01, LSD test). Both groups had their longest fixations in the
3. Results
The data were analyzed using two separate, 2 (mood: dysphoric
vs. control) × 4 (window size: no window vs. small vs. medium vs.
large) two-way mixed ANOVAs, one conducted for each dependent
measure. All reported effects use Greenhouse–Geisser correction in
the case of violated assumption of sphericity. Subsequent planned
comparisons were used to assess differences between groups or
levels.
Fig. 3. Mean fixation time in each window size condition for dysphoric and control
groups.
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small-window condition, but significant differences between all window size conditions were only found in the dysphoric group (p b .05
for all differences, with Bonferroni correction), whereas there was
no difference between the large-window and no-window conditions
in the control group.
3.3. Mean saccade size, number of fixations
There were no statistically significant effects involving the mood
factor in either the mean saccade size or the number of fixations during
reading of the sentences.
In summary, we obtained clear differences between dysphoric and
control participants on two temporal indices of the perceptual span:
Both sentence reading time and mean fixation duration indicated
that dysphoric participants were more sensitive to a reduced window
size, in turn suggesting a wider perceptual span for dysphorics than
for controls. We did not observe statistically significant differences
between the two groups for saccade size or number of fixations.
4. Discussion
In this research, we used eye tracking in order to test contrary
predictions deriving from two theories of information processing
in depression — defocused attention and analytical rumination. By
applying the moving window paradigm we showed that dysphoric
and control individuals differ in the sizes of their perceptual
span. Results regarding two temporal measures of perceptual span,
sentence reading time and mean fixation duration, showed a pattern
supporting the predictions of the defocused attention hypothesis.
The dysphoric group was more pronouncedly affected by a reduction in visible window size (minor decreases in the visible area
influenced their behavior) than was the control group for which
only one difference (i.e., between the small-window and nowindow conditions) was statistically significant. Furthermore, we
observed significant differences between the dysphoric and control
groups for the smallest window condition in terms of both measures, but no such differences for the no-window or large-window
conditions. This implies that dysphoric participants do not exhibit
a general deterioration of task performance, but that they are especially sensitive to shrinkage of the available visual field.
The defocused attention hypothesis proposed by von Hecker and
Meiser (2005) claims that people in a depressed mood have a specific
mode of attention, that is, a mode which is unfocused and unselective
but allows to acquire more information from outside, or from the periphery of, the ongoing task. In contrast, the analytical rumination hypothesis (Andrews and Thomson, 2009) states that a tendency to
focus attention and a systematic way of information processing are
key features of a depressive person's cognitive system. Although the
analytical rumination hypothesis addresses a much wider scope
than we covered here (in our study only one variety of attention,
namely, visuospatial attention, was tested), its core assumption is
that the depressive state elicits rumination and related internal cognitive processes. If a depressive state elicits rumination, then less capacity should be available for processing of the reading material,
resulting in a reduction of the perceptual span. A wider perceptual
span within dysphoric subjects, however, seems to indicate more,
not less attentional capacity, contradicting the AR hypothesis. Our
results are especially interesting when we consider not only the valence
dimension of the investigated affect but also its motivational direction,
namely, the motivation to approach or avoid a stimulus or situation.
Recent studies suggest that affects low in approach-related motivational intensity broaden the scope of attention whereas affects high
in approach-related motivational intensity narrow the attentional
span (Gable and Harmon-Jones, 2010). Sadness or dysphoria, as
these are affective states low in approach-related motivational intensity, may promote broadened attention because they assist
with disengagement from terminally blocked goals and cause the
organism to become open to new, perhaps previously irrelevant
possibilities (Klinger, 1975). As von Hecker and Meiser showed
(2005), such an unfocused and unselective mode of attention may
be beneficial in terms of memory performance. It is also in agreement with the assumption that after fruitless cognitive effort, motivation will plummet as part of the ensuing state of cognitive
“exhaustion”, leading to the occurrence of depressive symptoms
(Kofta and Sędek, 1997).
Interestingly, both the “analytical rumination” and the “defocused
attention” hypotheses point out that depression may have a positive
influence on cognition, although they predict quite opposite ways in
which such influences might happen. Whereas AR postulates a focusing of attention on specific task-relevant information, predictions of
DA are that mainly task-irrelevant elements are processed more thoroughly in depression. The present results seem to favor the DA hypothesis. Depressed people are characterized by a wider perceptual
span, which seems difficult to reconcile with a more focused processing
strategy. Attentional focusing should lead to a narrower span, but actually depressed subjects showed a deviation from normal reading already at a window size of 12 characters, where control subjects were
unaffected by peripheral masking. Instead, the results suggest that visual attention in depressed individuals may be spread out over a wider
spatial range, supporting the defocused attention hypothesis.
By using the moving window paradigm, we only tested one variety of attention, namely, visuospatial attention. Attention is a multifaceted construct, and the analytical rumination hypothesis mainly deals
with internal attentional processes. However, it is not unlikely that
the perceptual span during reading is at least partly affected by endogenous processes. Considering, for example, the resource metaphor
of attention (Kahneman, 1973), we think that a reduction of general
attentional capacity should cause a reduction of the perceptual
span. If a depressive state elicits rumination, then less capacity should
be available for the processing of materials to be read. A wider perceptual span, however, seems to indicate more, not less attentional
capacity.
However, there might also be an alternative explanation of our results, which is, in principle, compatible with both DA and AR hypotheses. The task used in our study did not require any kind of deeper,
analytical thinking (not to mention solving social problems to
which depressive states should predispose, according to AR theory).
Instead, participants were asked to just read simple sentences, and
it is possible that the current data reflect a processing mode outside
the scope of AR theory. If so, the present results are nevertheless important because they (a) delineate the scope of AR theory, and (b)
show a group difference that needs explanation, which DA can easily
provide.
With more depressogenic material or a more demanding task,
however, the pattern postulated by AR theory might still be obtained.
Such a speculation is supported by data in Joormann (2010) indicating that depression is associated with increased interference from irrelevant negative material and that depressed have difficulties
removing irrelevant negative material from short-term memory. It
is also possible that the experimentally induced narrowing of the perceptual span had detrimental effects in the dysphoric group because
of perceived difficulty. For dysphoric individuals hiding information
within a sentence might make the sentence reading harder to do,
and thus more annoying, than for controls. In order to answer the
question whether the perceptual span in depressed people will still
be found wider when more negative materials or a more difficult
task were used, more research needs to be done.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by a Polish Ministry of Science and
Higher Education grant (N106 017 31/1344) awarded to Aneta
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A. Brzezicka et al. / International Journal of Psychophysiology 85 (2012) 129–133
Brzezicka. We thank Iwona Bodziuch, Anna Wieczorek and Sylwia
Karwacka for their assistance in data acquisition.
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