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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2014 Apr 21.
Published in final edited form as: Depress Anxiety. 2014 Feb 27;31(3):178–187. doi: 10.1002/da.22255

Figure 1.

Figure 1

Schematic of the dot-probe task. Threat and neutral stimulus pairs are presented for a short (200 ms) or long (2,000 ms) duration, followed by a dot-probe replacing one of the two stimuli. Increased response latencies to dots in the incongruent location are frequently interpreted as an index of selective attention, or vigilance, to the threat stimulus. The terms “incongruent” and “congruent” are borrowed from the spatial attention literature. As commonly applied to the modified/emotional dot-probe task, the label “incongruent,” for trials in which the dot replaces the neutral cue, conveys the expectation that attention will tend to be more readily oriented toward emotional stimuli.