Transient arousal-driven or valence-driven? The effects of alerting cues on the attentional boost effect in depression-prone individuals.

Abstract

Background: Depression-related negative emotional processing bias is widely regarded as a core cognitive mechanism underlying the maintenance of depressive states. However, it remains unclear whether such bias disrupts fundamental cognitive enhancement processes driven by transient arousal. The Attentional Boost Effect (ABE), the phenomenon whereby stimuli concurrently presented with target detection events are better remembered than those paired with non-target events, is thought to reflect a phasic arousal enhancement mechanism triggered by target detection, whose processing pathway has been proposed to be relatively independent of emotional valence.

Method: This study employed a 2 (Group: depression-prone vs. healthy control) × 2 (Alerting cue: Cue vs. No-Cue) × 3 (Emotional valence: positive vs. neutral vs. negative) × 2 (Stimulus type: target-paired vs. distractor-paired) mixed factorial design. Eighty-one university students (42 in the depression-prone group, defined as BDI-II ≥ 14 and confirmed via DSM-5 structured clinical interview as not meeting diagnostic criteria for clinical depression; 39 in the healthy control group) completed both a classic ABE paradigm and an alerting ABE paradigm. The exogenous alerting cue was an orange circle signaling the imminent appearance of a target.

Result: (1) Both groups exhibited a significant ABE, with Bayesian analysis providing moderate evidence for the null hypothesis of no group difference in ABE (BF₀₁ = 3.2-6.7); (2) During encoding, a positivity advantage emerged under the No-Cue condition, whereas alerting cues significantly improved overall detection efficiency and attenuated valence-related differences; (3) During recognition, alerting cues modulated the ABE magnitude for emotional stimuli, with a particularly pronounced enhancement for positive information.

Conclusion: The negative bias in depression-prone individuals did not impair the fundamental arousal-regulation pathway; rather, their cognitive abnormalities exhibited pronounced context-dependence. Exogenous alerting cues may optimize attentional gating mechanisms, thereby reshaping attention allocation and memory enhancement patterns in depression-prone individuals. This study provides preliminary behavioral evidence for distinguishing "valence-driven" and "transient arousal-driven" cognitive enhancement pathways and offers tentative theoretical support for the potential utility of arousal-modulation-based intervention strategies in depression-prone populations.