The Flicker Paradigm: an old tool in a new guise for analyzing automatic and voluntary dimensions of the attentional bias.

Attention is related to bottom-up (automatic) and top-down (voluntary) processes which affect attentional bias (AB) toward environmental stimuli. AB occurs when attention is preferentially directed toward salient stimuli and is commonly reported in multiple psychopathologies representing a possible etiology and maintenance factor. Studies on mood and anxiety disorders, as well as on behavioral disorders (e.g., behavioral addiction, eating disorders), justify treatment drop-out and self-maintaining of disorders with AB. This frame appears relevant to analyze how both automatic and voluntary attentional processes are involved in AB toward pathological-relevant stimuli (e.g., threatening stimuli for anxiety disorders or appetitive stimuli for eating disorders). A promising cognitive paradigm that may furnish measures of both the processes involved in AB, helping in the analysis of multiple psychopathological conditions, is the Flicker Paradigm. It induces change blindness by presenting alternating visual scenes of real life, identical but different for only one particular. Structural characteristics of the task allow analyzing automatic and voluntary components of attention due to the movement of focused attention in the environment. The salience of a visual stimulus influences the exogenous or automatic orienting of attention, while the subject’s goals drive the endogenous or voluntary orienting of attention.