Thomas Edward Gladwin

Institute for Globally Distributed Open Research and Education (IGDORE) | IGDORE

Concerns have been raised about the low reliability of measurements of spatial attentional bias via RT differences in dot-probe tasks. The anticipatory form of the bias, directed towards predicted future stimuli, appears to have relatively good reliability, reaching around 0.70. However, studies thus far have not attempted to experimentally control...

Natural environments have positive effects on mental health, but the nature of this relationship requires further understanding. There may be psychosocial aspects of this relationship that are reflected in the semantic structure of language. Natural language processing methods provide a tool to explore this possibility. In this study, machine learn...

Automatic associations involving alcohol have been proposed to play a role in drinking behavior. Such associations are often assessed using implicit measures such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Neural network language models provide computational measures of semantic relationships between words. These model-based measures could be related...

Much of the extensive literature on spatial attentional bias is built on measurements using the dot-probe task. In recent years, concerns have been raised about the psychometric properties of bias scores derived from this task. The goal of the current paper is to look ahead and evaluate possible responses of the field to this situation from a metas...

Climate change is a reality that can no longer be ignored, so much so that combating climate change and its impact is one of the main goals of the UN Agenda 2030. Youths, albeit the main victims of climate change, are often excluded from decision-making processes on sustainable actions. More and more young people are joining collective pro-environm...

Estimating the number of principal components to retain for dimension reduction is a critical step in many applications of principal component analysis. Common methods may not be optimal, however. The current paper presents an alternative procedure that aims to recover the true number of principal components, in the sense of the number of independe...

Computational model-based semantic vectors, or word embeddings, provide a measurement of relationships between words. Semantic vectors could be combined with continuous Hopfield networks in an analogy of distributed representational models to further connect such relationships to a model of a cognitive process. The current study tested relationship...

Multiple frameworks exist for conceptualizing mental health. A complementary approach presented here uses computational semantic representations combined with explicitly qualitative interpretation. This provides a “society’s eye view” of mental health as represented in language. We summarize how we combined computational and qualitative methods to...

Background and aims: Substance use disorders (SUD) are associated with cognitive deficits that are not always addressed in current treatments, and this hampers recovery. Cognitive training and remediation interventions are well suited to fill the gap for managing cognitive deficits in SUD. We aimed to reach consensus on recommendations for develop...

Automatic associations involving alcohol have been proposed to play a role in drinking behavior. Suchassociations are often assessed using implicit measures such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Neuralnetwork language models provide computational measures of semantic relationships between words.These model-based measures could be related to...

Much of the extensive literature on spatial attentional bias is built on measurements using the dot-probe task. In recent years, concerns have been raised about the psychometric properties of bias scores derived from this task. The goal of the current paper is to look ahead and evaluate possible responses of the field to this situation from a metas...

Objectives: In terms of dual process models, behaviour can be conceived of as the outcome of an interplay between reflective, top-down and impulsive, bottom-up processes. Behaviour change interventions may benefit from targeting both types of processes in a coherent way. One approach to this, in the context of reducing hazardous drinking, is to co...

Background and Aims Substance use disorders (SUD) are associated with cognitive deficits that are not always addressed in current treatments, and this hampers recovery. Cognitive training and remediation interventions are well suited to fill the gap for managing cognitive deficits in SUD. We aimed to reach consensus on recommendations for developin...

The translation of the outcome-devaluation paradigm to study habit in humans has yielded interesting insights but proven to be challenging. We present a novel, outcome-revaluation task with a symmetrical design, in the sense that half of the available outcomes are always valuable and the other half not-valuable. In the present studies, during the i...

Dual systems models have been highly influential and productive in generating research related to impulsive and reflective behaviour. However, there is also long-standing criticism of such models, and, in response, attempts have been made to find possible improvement in theoretical frameworks. The current study presents a simple abstraction of one...

Background: Many people with diabetes will develop foot ulcers. To reduce risk, it is recommended that the feet are protected against harm and checked daily. Spouses can help people with diabetes care for their feet. Methods: A randomized parallel arm design compared information sheets given to participants with diabetes and their spouses (dyad...

Convergent evidence supports a crucial role for dysfunctional appraisals in the development and maintenance of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, most research in this area has used self-report measures, assessing only explicit forms of such negative cognitions; the relevance of their more automatically-activated counterparts, as assum...

To investigate the balance between goal-directed and habitual control in controlled experimental settings, animal researchers developed the outcome-revaluation paradigm. The translation of this paradigm to humans has yielded interesting insights but proven to be challenging. We present a novel, symmetrical outcome-revaluation task in which outcomes...

In order to minimize risk of infection and potential foot complications, it is recommended that people with and without diabetes check their feet regularly for problems such as cuts, sores, blisters or calluses. Hence, an understanding of how to craft effective messages to encourage people to check their feet is important. Two studies investigated...

Background Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, and impulsive aggression are linked to transdiagnostic neurocognitive deficits. This includes impaired inhibitory control over inappropriate responses. Prior studies showed that inhibitory control can be improved by modulating the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) with transcranial direct...

Threatening stimuli have varying effects, including reaction time (RT) increase in working memory tasks. This could reflect disruption of working memory or, alternatively, a reversible state of freezing. In the current series of experiments, reversible slowing due to anticipated threat was studied using the cued Virtual Attack Emotional Sternberg T...

Observability of threat-related spatial attentional biases may require previous-trial responses associated with threat-related locations. This carryover effect might affect reliability and correlations. In Study 1, a diagonalized Visual Probe Task was completed online (N=131) with colour, anger, fear and disgust stimuli, with questionnaires on aggr...

Concerns have been raised about the low reliability of measurements of spatial attentional bias via RT differences in dot-probe tasks. The anticipatory form of the bias, directed towards predicted future stimuli, appears to have relatively good reliability, reaching around .70. However, studies thus far have not attempted to experimentally control...

Self-regulation is the ability to monitor and modulate emotions, behaviour, and cognition in order to adapt to changing circumstances. Developing adequate self-regulation is associated with better social coping and higher educational achievement later in life; poor self-regulation has been linked to a variety of detrimental developmental outcomes....

The paper presents the details of an implementation of repeated measures ANOVA, consisting of a set of functions to organize data and represent contrasts to be tested and run statistical tests. The implementation is focused on uses common in experimental psychology. An arbitrary number of within-subject factors, each with an arbitrary number of lev...

Aggression after military deployment is a common occurrence in veterans. Neurobiological research has shown that aggression is associated with a dysfunction in a network connecting brain regions implicated in threat processing and emotion regulation. However, aggression may also be related to deficits in networks underlying communication and social...

Cues that predict the future location of emotional stimuli may evoke an anticipatory form of automatic attentional bias. The reliability of this bias towards threat is uncertain: experimental design may need to be optimized or individual differences may simply be relatively noisy in the general population. The current study therefore aimed to deter...

This evolving document is my combination essay-tutorial-manifesto on foundational concepts of statistics, primarily meant to help strengthen statistical thinking using programming and simulated experiments to make concepts concrete, rather than formal mathematics. It further aims to explain and justify the role of null hypothesis significance testi...

Cues that predict the future location of emotional stimuli may evoke an anticipatory form of automatic attentional bias. The reliability of this bias towards threat is uncertain: experimental design may need to be optimized or individual differences may simply be relatively noisy in the general population. The current study therefore aimed to deter...

Prospective memory (PM) is the ability to execute future intended actions and may be negatively affected by impulsivity. The current study aimed to address questions on (1) relationships of PM with facets of impulsivity; (2) psychometric properties of a PM task, in particular convergent validity with self-reported PM; and (3) whether external suppo...

Introduction: Prospective Memory (PM), the ability to execute future intentions, decreases with age and memory-related disorders and may be an early predictor of dementia. The Memory for Intentions Test (MIST) allows the assessment of multiple aspects of PM using a range of subtasks. The current study evaluated and explored a Portuguese version of...

Temporary free access: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1aDWt_6zzLsDQX Previous studies suggest that cues predicting the outcome of attentional shifts provide a measure of anticipatory alcohol-related attentional bias that is correlated with risky drinking and has high reliability. However, this is complicated by potential contributions of visual fe...

Threatening stimuli are thought to induce impulsive responses, but Emotional Go/Nogo task results are not in line with this. We extend previous research by testing effects of task-relevance of emotional stimuli and virtual proximity. Four studies were performed to test this in healthy college students. When emotional stimuli were task-relevant, thr...

Concerns have been raised about the reliability of dot-probe tasks. The cued Visual Probe Task (cVPT) uses cues predicting locations of emotional stimuli, which appears to improve reliability. However, cVPT reliability could be affected by individual differences involving cue features. Here, we assessed specifically anticipatory reliability. Furthe...

Threatening stimuli have varying effects, including reaction time increase in working memory tasks. This could reflect disruption of working memory or, alternatively, a reversible state of freezing. In the current series of experiments, reversible slowing due to anticipated threat was studied using the cued Virtual Attack Emotional Sternberg Task (...

Convergent evidence supports a crucial role for dysfunctional appraisals in the development and maintenance of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, most research in this area has used self-report measures, assessing only explicit forms of such negative cognitions; the relevance of their more automatically-activated counterparts, as assum...

In: Alcoholism and Drug Addiction, 32 (1): 63-70. Background Although risky drinking and alcohol dependence have been associated with spatial attentional biases, concerns have been raised about the reliability of the frequently-used dot-probe task. A form of anticipatory bias related to predictive cues has been found to be related to alcohol-rela...

Visual Probe Tasks (VPTs) have been extensively used to measure spatial attentional biases, but as usually analysed, VPTs do not consider trial-to-trial carryover effects of probe location: Does responding to a probe on, e.g., the location of a threat cue affect the bias on the subsequent trial? The aim of the current study was to confirm whether t...

Visual Probe Tasks (VPTs) have been extensively used to measure spatial attentional biases, but as usually analysed, VPTs do not consider trial-to-trial carryover effects of probe location: Does responding to a probe on, e.g., the location of a threat cue affect the bias on the subsequent trial? The aim of the current study was to confirm whether t...

Real-life shooting decisions typically occur under acute threat and require fast switching between vigilant situational assessment and immediate fight-or-flight actions. Recent studies suggested that freezing facilitates action preparation and decision-making but the neurocognitive mechanisms remain unclear. We applied functional magnetic resonance...

In press at Consciousness and Cognition. Threatening stimuli are thought to induce impulsive responses, but Emotional Go/Nogo task results are not in line with this. We extend previous research by comparing effects of task-relevance of emotional stimuli and virtual proximity. Four studies were performed to test this in healthy college students. Whe...

Background: Childhood trauma and combat-related trauma are both associated with decreased psychosocial functioning. Coping strategies play an important role in the adjustment to traumatic events. Objective: The present study examined childhood trauma and the mediating role of coping strategies in adult psychological symptoms in a non-clinical milit...

Attention Bias Modification (ABM) aims to modulate attentional biases, but questions remain about its efficacy and there may be new variants yet to explore. The current study tested effects of a novel version of ABM, predictive ABM (predABM), using visually neutral cues predicting the locations of future threatening and neutral stimuli that had a c...

Attention Bias Modification (ABM) aims to modulate attentional biases, but questions remain about its efficacy and there may be new variants yet to explore. The current study tested effects of a novel version of ABM, predictive ABM (predABM), using visually neutral cues predicting the locations of future threatening and neutral stimuli that had a c...

The ability to control action is crucial for adaptive responding, but may be compromised in situations involving strong emotions (e.g., threat) or when people are deprived of resources (e.g., sleep). As compromised action control can have large consequences in threatening situations, for example when police officers face a potentially armed suspect...

Proactive inhibition – the anticipation of having to stop a response ‐ relies on objective information contained in cue‐related contingencies in the environment, as well as on the subjective interpretation derived from these cues. To date, most studies of brain areas underlying proactive inhibition have exclusively considered the objective predicti...

Background Although risky drinking and alcohol dependence have been associated with spatial attentional biases, concerns have been raised about the reliability of the frequently-used dot-probe task. A form of anticipatory bias related to predictive cues has been found to be related to alcohol-related processes, and to have high reliability in the c...

Appendix S1. Supplementary materials on side‐effects, blinding, mood, and working memory. Fig. A. Overview of reported side‐effects. Fig. B. Stimulation type blinding. Fig. C. Pre and post scores for working memory and mood.

Background Modifying attentional processes with attentional bias modification (ABM) might be a relevant add‐on to treatment in addiction. This study investigated whether influencing cortical plasticity with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) could increase training effects. TDCS could also help alcohol‐dependent patients to overcome cra...

Background: Working memory capacity has been found to be impaired in adolescents with various psychological problems, such as addictive behaviors. Training of working memory capacity can lead to significant behavioral improvements, but it is usually long and tedious, taxing participants' motivation to train. Objective: This study aimed to evalua...

Emotionally salient stimuli have the ability to disrupt cognitive processing. This kind of disruption involves effects on working memory and may be related to mental health problems. To explore the nature of such emotional interference on working memory, a Virtual Attack Emotional Sternberg Task (VAEST) was used. Neutral faces were presented as dis...

Dot-Probe or Visual Probe Tasks (VPTs) are used extensively to measure attentional biases. A novel variant termed the cued VPT (cVPT) was developed to focus on the anticipatory component of attentional bias. The current study aimed to establish an anticipatory attentional bias to threat using the cVPT and compare its split-half reliability with a t...

Dysfunctional appraisals are a key factor suggested to be involved in the development and maintenance of PTSD. Research has shown that experimental induction of a positive or negative appraisal style following a laboratory stressor affects analogue posttraumatic stress symptoms. This supports a causal role of appraisal in the development of traumat...

Dot‐probe or visual probe tasks (VPTs) are used extensively to measure attentional biases. A novel variant termed the cued VPT (cVPT) was developed to focus on the anticipatory component of attentional bias. This study aimed to establish an anticipatory attentional bias to threat using the cVPT and compare its split‐half reliability with a typical...

Impulsive aggression is common amongst military personnel after deployment, and may arise because of impaired top-down regulation of the amgydala by prefrontal regions. This study sought to further explore this hypothesis via resting-state functional connectivity analyses in impulsively aggressive combat veterans. Male combat veterans with (n = 28)...

Objective: One of the risks of alcohol use is violent behavior. The aim of the current study was to explore the role of automatic cognitive associations between alcohol and power and between alcohol and aggression in alcohol-related aggression and to test the moderating role of executive control. Method: Implicit association tests (IATs) were used...

Anger and aggression are common mental health problems after military deployment. Anger and aggression have been associated with abnormalities in subcortical and cortical levels of the brain and their connectivity. Here, we tested brain activation during the processing of emotional stimuli in military veterans with and without anger and aggression...

Attentional bias variability may be related to alcohol abuse. Of potential use for studying variability is the anticipatory attentional bias: Bias due to the locations of predictively-cued rather than already-presented stimuli. The hypothesis was tested that conflicting automatic associations are related to attentional bias variability. Further, re...

BACKGROUND Working memory capacity has been found to be impaired in adolescents with various psychological problems, such as addictive behaviors. Training of working memory capacity can lead to significant behavioral improvements, but it is usually long and tedious, taxing participants’ motivation to train. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to evaluate w...

Objective: PTSD is related to attentional biases, which are commonly measured using the Dot-Probe Task. Recent research has shown that trial-to-trial variability may contain important information in such tasks. The current study aimed to determine whether trial-to-trial carry-over effects in this task are related to PTSD symptoms. Method: Dot-Probe...

Problems involving anger and aggression are common after military deployment, and may involve abnormal responses to threat. This study therefore investigated effects on neural activation related to threat and escapability among veterans with deployment experience. Twenty-seven male veterans with anger and aggression problems (Anger group) and 30 Co...

Automatic processes related to addiction can be directly targeted in novel training paradigms. First studies have demonstrated that Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM) targeting approach biases can enhance treatment outcomes when added to regular treatment. However, the overall efficacy of CBM is debated. We argue that considering the modulating role...

Cognitive retraining or cognitive bias modification (CBM) involves having subjects repeatedly perform a computerized task designed to reduce the impact of automatic processes that lead to harmful behavior. We first discuss the theory underlying CBM and provide a brief overview of important research progress in its application to addiction. We then...

Attentional Bias Modification (ABM) usually aims to induce automatic biases directed toward or away from certain stimulus categories. An alternative approach, termed Attention Control Training (ACT), uses a similar paradigm but aims to train the ability to exert top-down control over attention and downregulate bottom-up interference. The current st...

Two studies showed an improvement in clinical outcomes after alcohol approach bias retraining, a form of Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM). We investigated whether transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) could enhance effects of CBM. TDCS is a neuromodulation technique that can increase neuroplasticity and has previously been found to reduce...

Aims There is accumulating evidence that automatic processes play a large role in alcohol dependence, which may be related to alcohol craving and consumption. The aim of this study is to investigate associations between cognitive biases in alcohol-dependent patients, and how these measures relate to drinking behavior. Methods Thirty alcohol-depend...

Genetic variations in the mu-opioid receptor (OPRM1) gene have been related to high sensitivity to rewarding effects of alcohol. The current study focuses on the neural circuitry underlying this phenomenon using an alcohol versus water taste-cue reactivity paradigm in a young sample at relatively early stages of alcohol use, thus limiting the confo...

Background Cognitive bias modification (CBM) can be used to retrain automatic approach tendencies for alcohol. We investigated whether changing cortical excitability with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) could enhance CBM effects in hazardous drinkers. We also studied the underlying mechanisms by including behavioral (craving, implici...

Aim: Alcohol dependency is characterized by alcohol-related interpretation biases (IBs): Individuals with high levels of alcohol consumption generate more alcohol-related than alcohol-unrelated interpretations in response to ambiguous alcohol-related cues. However, a response bias could be an alternative account, meaning that individuals with high...

Cluster-based analysis methods in neuroimaging provide control of whole-brain false positive rates without the need to conservatively correct for the number of voxels and the associated false negative results. The current method defines clusters based purely on shapes in the landscape of activation, instead of requiring the choice of a statistical...

Alcohol use is associated with attentional biases for alcohol-related stimuli, as it has been measured via effects on mean performance measures in dot-probe tasks. However, the variability of attentional biases may contain essential information related to behavior and symptoms. Bias variability refers to short-time scale fluctuation in bias to and...

Neuroimaging studies have documented reduced striatal dopamine D2/D3 receptor (D2/D3R) availability in cocaine abusers, which has been associated with impaired prefrontal activity and vulnerability for relapse. However, the mechanism(s) underlying the decreases in D2/D3R remain poorly understood. Recent studies have shown that sleep deprivation is...

Background: Instrumental action is well known to be vulnerable to affective value. Excessive transfer of affective value to instrumental action is thought to contribute to psychiatric disorders. The brain region most commonly implicated in overriding such affective biasing of instrumental action is the prefrontal cortex. Objective: The aim of th...

Appendix S1 Instrumental learning.

Freezing is an evolutionarily preserved defensive behavior, characterized by immobility and heart rate deceleration, which is thought to promote visual perception. Rapid perceptual assessment of threat is crucial in life-threatening situations; for example, when policemen need to make split-second decisions about the use of deadly force. Here, we h...

The great promise of comparative neuroscience is to understand why brains differ by investigating the relations between differences in the organization of different brains, their evolutionary history, and their current ecological niche. For this approach to be successful, the organization of different brains needs to be quantifiable. Here, we prese...

Adolescence is a period in which brain structures involved in motivation and cognitive control continue to develop and also a period in which many youth begin substance use. Dual-process models propose that, among substance users, implicit or automatically activated neurocognitive processes gain in relative influence on substance use behavior, whil...

Alcohol-approach tendencies have been associated with heavy drinking and play a role in the transition to alcohol abuse. Such cognitive biases might predict future alcohol use better under a low dose of alcohol. The aim of this prospective study was to investigate both the magnitude and the predictive power of alcohol-induced changes on approach-av...

Alcohol-dependent patients have been shown to faster approach than avoid alcohol stimuli on the Approach Avoidance Task (AAT). This so-called alcohol approach bias has been associated with increased brain activation in the medial prefrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens. Cognitive bias modification (CBM) has been used to retrain the approach bias wi...

Background Cognitive bias modification (CBM) studies have provided evidence that cognitive biases play a causal role in alcohol use disorders. In this study, data from a CBM experiment in alcoholic patients were re-analyzed. In the original study, no mediation by associations measured with an Implicit Association Test (IAT) was found. In this study...

Models distinguishing two types of processes or systems—typically one more automatic and/or affective-motivational, one more controlled and/or calculating-deliberative—are widespread in psychological science. However, such dual-process (or dual-system) models suffer from various problems and have been substantially criticized recently. In this chap...