What Is Attentional Bias?

Close up of a person's eye
Dimitri Vervitsiotis / Getty Images
Table of Contents
View All
Table of Contents

Attentional bias is the tendency to pay attention to some things while simultaneously ignoring others. This represents a type of cognitive bias. Attentional bias affects not only the things that we perceive in the environment but the decisions that we make based on our perceptions.

At a Glance

Attentional biases make it so we pay more attention to certain things around us, while simultaneously ignoring others. This is important for survival, but factors like emotions, past experience, stress, and expectations can also affect how we focus our attentional resources. This bias can affect our decisions, memories, and behaviors. It's also not easy to overcome, but using mindfulness and thinking critically can help you minimize its effects.

What Is Attentional Bias?

Attentional bias is a phenomenon in which people pay more attention to certain types of stimuli. Because we are surrounded by an abundance of perceptual information, we have to prioritize what we attend to in order to make the most of our limited resources.

The attentional bias can be adaptive in many situations, particularly if you are dealing with threats. It allows you to attend to the things in your environment that present the greatest danger and require some type of response. However, paying too much attention to things that are not really threats can contribute to problems including poor decisions and anxiety.

We might like to think that we take all the alternatives into consideration when we make decisions. But the reality is that we often overlook some options and possible outcomes.

History of Attentional Bias

One of the earliest tests of attentional bias was first introduced during the mid-1930s.  This method is known as the Stroop test. In this type of test, participants are asked to name the color of a printed word. In experiments, participants are shown words that are either emotionally negative or emotionally neutral.

The Stroop test measures how long it takes a participant to name the color of a word on a card. Some words are emotionally negative ("death," "kill"), while some are neutral ("table," "chair"). If it takes a person longer to name the color of a negative word, it’s assumed the person is affected by the negative content, and the delay is attributed to emotional bias.

Essentially, the participants pay more attention to emotionally negative words, so it takes them longer to name the color of these words than those words that require less attention.

What Causes Attentional Bias?

So why do we pay more attention to certain stimuli and ignore others? A few different factors may play a role:

Evolutionary Influences

Some experts believe that this tendency might have an evolutionary basis. Our ancestors were more likely to survive if they paid greater attention to risky aspects of the environment and ignored stimuli that did not pose a threat. This is known as threat-related attentional bias.

If you have ever been in a frightening situation and experienced what is often referred to as "tunnel vision"—in which you became hyper-aware and acutely focused on a specific threat—you can probably see how this tendency can be helpful.

Emotional States

Researchers have found that emotional states can influence attentional bias. Anxious individuals tend to exhibit attentional bias early during an information process, while depressed individuals typically show attentional bias when stimuli are presented for a long period of time.

Cognitive Load

Attentional biases can also happen when people are under a great deal of stress or trying to deal with things that require a great deal of cognitive resources. In such situations, they're more likely to focus on things that are the most attention-grabbing or that require the least amount of effort.

Expectations and Experience

The expectations that people have and their past experiences can also influence attentional biases. People are more likely to pay attention to things they are expecting or that they are interested in, which means they are more likely to tune out the stimuli that are unexpected or irrelevant.

Recap

Evolutionary factors play an important role in attentional biases. People are hardwired to notice things in the environment that might pose a threat to survival. Other factors, including emotions, stress, expectations, and past experiences can also impact whether we experience attentional biases in a situation.

Examples of Attentional Bias

In order to understand how attentional bias might influence your perceptions and behaviors, it can be helpful to consider a few examples.

Political decision-making is one area that can be influenced by biased attention. On Stroop tests, people who tend to be politically liberal pay more attention to words with emotionally positive content, whereas people who are politically conservative are more likely to attend to negative words.

Attentional bias can also have an impact on addictive behavior. When a person who smokes is craving a cigarette, they are more likely to have slower reaction times when they encounter smoking-related words on Stroop tests.  This tendency to attend more to smoking triggers may make quitting more difficult.

Impact of Attentional Bias

As you might imagine, this type of bias can have a dramatic impact on the decision-making process and can lead people to make bad or inaccurate choices. It can also have an effect on the course of mental health conditions as well as the efficacy of the treatments for those disorders.

Mental Health Conditions

Researchers have found that people who have eating disorders tend to pay more attention to stimuli related to food, while individuals experiencing drug addictions tend to be hypersensitive to drug-related cues.

For people struggling to recover from an eating disorder or addiction, this tendency to pay attention to certain signals while discounting others can make recovery more difficult.

Memories

The attentional bias can also have an impact on memories. Since people can become overly focused on a single stimulus, they might neglect to notice other aspects of a situation. When recollecting the event, memories may be distorted, inaccurate, or incomplete due to this bias.

Traumatic experiences, for example, can be affected by attentional biases that influence how people recall the memories of those events.

Anxiety Treatment

Some research indicates that attentional biases can play a role in the effectiveness of anxiety treatment. Exposure therapy is a first-line treatment for anxiety and phobias, which involves being gradually exposed to the source of a fear until the anxiety response eventually decreases.

One study found that people who focus on things that make them anxious tend to have greater reductions in anxiety after exposure treatment. 

Attentional biases may contribute to anxiety and depression. Research suggests that people with anxiety and depression tend to be more biased toward negative stimuli.

How to Avoid Attentional Bias

Because attentional bias is part of how the brain functions, it is hard to avoid altogether. Even identifying the bias can be incredibly difficult, since it often occurs on an automatic, unconscious level.

However, there are a few strategies that may help reduce attentional bias. Some that you might try include the following:

Practice Mindfulness

Mindfulness involves becoming more aware of the self and the present moment. It may help you overcome attentional bias by getting you to focus more on many different aspects of your environment, rather than just those that immediately grab your attention.

Research has found that brief mindfulness interventions can be effective in improving emotional processing and reducing attentional bias.

Receive Reinforcement

One study found that using positive reinforcement, which involved praising people with depression for noticing positive stimuli and ignoring negative stimuli, could minimize the effects of negative attentional biases.

Consider enlisting the help of supportive friends and loved ones who can give you positive feedback.

Assess Your Thinking

Before making a decision, spend some time considering whether you've given adequate thought to all of the factors that play a role. By analyzing your thinking, you may find that you're paying too much attention to certain kinds of information and ignoring others.

Takeaway

Attentional biases are a common phenomenon, and in most cases, they operate automatically and unconsciously. While they can often be adaptive and may even aid in survival, they can also serve to negatively impact decision-making and contribute to problems with depression and anxiety.

While it isn't possible to eliminate these biases, becoming aware of their effects and being mindful of other sources of information may help you make more informed, accurate choices.

10 Sources
Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.
  1. Ben-Haim M, Williams P, Howard Z, Mama Y, Eidels A, Algom D. The emotional Stroop task: Assessing cognitive performance under exposure to emotional content. J Vis Exp. 2016;(112):53720. doi:10.3791/53720

  2. Nummenmaa L, Hietanen JK, Calvo MG, Hyönä J. Food catches the eye but not for everyone: A BMI–contingent attentional bias in rapid detection of nutriments. PLoS ONE. 2011;6(5):e19215. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0019215

  3. Azriel O, Bar-Haim Y. Attention bias. In: Abramowitz JS, Blakey SM, eds. Clinical Handbook of Fear and Anxiety: Maintenance Processes and Treatment Mechanisms. American Psychological Association; 2020:203-218. doi:10.1037/0000150-012

  4. Lichtenstein-Vidne L, Okon-Singer H, Cohen N, et al. Attentional bias in clinical depression and anxiety: The impact of emotional and non-emotional distracting information. Biol Psychol. 2017;122:4-12. doi:10.1016/j.biopsycho.2016.07.012

  5. Carraro L, Castelli L, Macchiella C. The automatic conservative: ideology-based attentional asymmetries in the processing of valenced informationPLoS One. 2011;6(11):e26456. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0026456

  6. Field M, Munafò MR, Franken IH. A meta-analytic investigation of the relationship between attentional bias and subjective craving in substance abusePsychol Bull. 2009;135(4):589-607. doi:10.1037/a0015843

  7. Imbriano G, Waszczuk M, Rajaram S, et al. Association of attention and memory biases for negative stimuli with post-traumatic stress disorder symptomsJ Anxiety Disord. 2022;85:102509. doi:10.1016/j.janxdis.2021.102509

  8. Veerapa E, Grandgenevre P, El Fayoumi M, et al. Attentional bias towards negative stimuli in healthy individuals and the effects of trait anxiety. Sci Rep. 2020;10(1):11826. doi:10.1038/s41598-020-68490-5

  9. Wu R, Liu LL, Zhu H, et al. Brief mindfulness meditation improves emotion processing. Front Neurosci. 2019;13:1074. doi:10.3389/fnins.2019.01074

  10. Cooper JA, Gorlick MA, Denny T, Worthy DA, Beevers CG, Maddox WT. Training attention improves decision making in individuals with elevated self-reported depressive symptoms. Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci. 2014;14(2):729-741. doi:10.3758/s13415-013-0220-4

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd
Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."