Urban and natural contexts differentially module attention bias towards threat

Recent research showing that amygdala hyperactivity is associated with urban living raises the possibility that attention bias to fear-related stimuli, a cognitive response thought to be underpinned by amygdala hyperactivity, may be enhanced by exposure to urban environments. To investigate, we asked young adults to complete a face attention task involving threatening and non-threatening distractors before and after watching a 25-minute video showing an immersive walk in city streets or a nature reserve. A crossover design was used so that all participants viewed both videos. In the face attention task, participants made a speeded gender identification of spatially cued target faces (neutral expression), ignoring a concurrent distractor that was either a face bearing a neutral, happy, or fearful expression or a scrambled face image. Although performance in the face attention task was unaffected by distractor-type after viewing the nature video, fearful faces specifically slowed responses after viewing the urban video, an effect that was independent of mood and stress level before or after viewing the video. These results show for the first time that exposure to urban stimuli increases attention sensitivity to threatening face stimuli. Such finding suggest that urban environments may heighten vigilance to sensory stimuli that are not directly pertinent to on-going tasks, a process that may underpin the association between cities and anxiety disorders.