Psychological Research

, Volume 82, Issue 3, pp 520–534 | Cite as

Can training change attentional breadth? Failure to find transfer effects

  • Lin Fang
  • Kristof Hoorelbeke
  • Lynn Bruyneel
  • Lies Notebaert
  • Colin MacLeod
  • Rudi De Raedt
  • Ernst H. W. Koster
Original Article
First Online:
Received:
Accepted:

Abstract

Recently, there is increasing interest in the causal relationship between attentional breadth and emotion regulation. To test this causal relationship, attentional breadth needs to be manipulated stringently. The aim of the current research was to establish whether visual attentional breadth could be manipulated through experimental training procedures. We conducted two single-session training experiments and one multiple-session training experiment, all of which contained pre- and post-training assessments to test the direct transfer effects of training on attentional breadth construed in different measures. For the first single-session training (Experiment 1), no training effects were found to transfer to the subsequent attentional breadth measures in terms of global–local processing preference. For the second single-session training (Experiment 2) and the 5-day training (Experiment 3) which combined both trainings from Experiment 1 and 2, there were some indications that attentional breadth can be decreased, but there was no evidence that it could be increased neither in terms of global–local processing preference nor in terms of scope of visual perception. Bayesian analysis confirmed the null hypothesis of no increase in attentional breadth through delivery of these training procedures. Therefore, our findings do not support the hypothesis that training variants of the Global–Local attentional breadth task or of the visuospatial attentional breadth task can stably alter attentional breadth in healthy students. Possible explanations and implications are discussed.

Keywords

Visual attention Attentional scope Emotion regulation Single-session training Multiple-session training 
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Notes

Compliance with ethical standards

Funding

Lin Fang has received a research Grant (201306770031) from China Scholarship Council (CSC). Kristof Hoorelbeke has received a Special Research Fund (BOF) of Ghent University (B/13808/01). Rudi De Raedt and Ernst Koster have received a Project Grant for a Concerted Research Action of Ghent University (BOF16/GOA/017).

Conflict of interest

All the authors report no conflicts of interest.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Experimental-Clinical and Health PsychologyGhent UniversityGhentBelgium
  2. 2.Centre for the Advancement of Research on Emotion, School of PsychologyUniversity of Western AustraliaPerthAustralia

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