Tones, Dots and Attentional Biases: An autobiographical account of the development, first implementation, and reception of my attentional-probe paradigm (aka dot-probe paradigm)

The attentional probe paradigm involves presenting participants with different messages simultaneously through two distinct information channels within the same modality. By measuring reaction times to modality-specific probes that can appear in either channel, this paradigm enables the assessment of attention allocation between these channels. Since the 1980s this paradigm has become prominent for investigating attentional biases in the processing of emotional information. The best-known version of it, the dot-probe technique introduced by MacLeod, Mathews, and Tata (1986), uses the visual modality. What is less well-known is that I had previously introduced the attentional probe paradigm in 1981 in the auditory modality in a modified dichotic listening experiment with pure tones as auditory probes. Using this tone-probe technique this study investigated the contrasting ways in which repressors and sensitisers (Byrne,1961) handle threatening information. Criticisms from a contemporary perspective notwithstanding of the rather limited initial study, it was concluded that sensitisers displayed an attentional bias favouring the processing of threatening stimuli, whereas repressors appeared to avoid the optimal processing of such stimuli. This paper presents a historical reconstruction of how I developed the attentional probe paradigm, how I first applied it in the auditory modality, and how it was subsequently used in the visual modality. It also introduces a multimodal version to be used in further research and offers a critique of extant research relying exclusively on decontextualized stimuli.