Attentional Bias

What is attentional bias?

Attentional bias is a tendency to give some information more attention than other information. What you notice can depend on your goals, emotions, beliefs, and experience.

Attentional bias examples

Someone afraid of spiders might quickly notice a spider-like shape. Someone anxious about social judgment might focus on people who seem to be looking at them. These illustrate selective attention; they are not diagnostic tests.

Attention also depends on the task. Simons and Chabris (1999) showed that what people are asked to attend to affects whether they notice an unexpected object.

It is worth separating attention from memory and interpretation. Gotlib and colleagues (2004) found that measures of these emotional biases were not interchangeable. Noticing negative information, remembering it, and interpreting an event negatively are different observations.

Why some information gets priority

Current goals direct attention toward information needed for the task: looking for a departure gate changes what you scan on an airport display. Attention can also be pulled by cues that have acquired importance through experience. In Anderson, Laurent, and Yantis’s experiment, participants learned to associate colors with monetary rewards. Later, a previously rewarded color distracted them during a different search task even though it was irrelevant and no longer earned a reward. What once mattered could still compete with the present goal.

Emotionally significant information, such as a possible threat, is another focus of attentional-bias research. The type of cue, the person, and the task matter; there is no single rule that threatening or rewarding information always wins.

Attentional Bias in the Workplace

Imagine a feedback dashboard that displays complaints in large red cards while showing other comments in small gray text. A team may spend most of its review time on the prominent complaints and miss less visible reports of the same problem. The first question is where attention went. Whether the team later remembers only complaints or interprets every comment negatively concerns different processes. Comparing the full set of reports can show whether the visual emphasis fits the decision.

Why it matters

Selective attention lets us work with more information than we could examine equally. It can also leave important information out. When examining a decision, ask what the person noticed and what they missed.