Cognitive bias modification – Priming with an ambiguous homograph is necessary to detect an interpretation training effect

Biases in the interpretation of ambiguous information may have a causal role in producing and maintaining anxiety. Training with repeated exposure to emotionally valenced meanings has been found to produce such a bias, as measured by lexical decisions for targets primed with related emotionally ambiguous homographs. Interpretation bias is thought to occur only when ambiguity causes competition for processing resources, but similar results might occur if valenced training causes a response bias. Twenty participants underwent training, followed by a lexical decision task with no ambiguous primes preceding the target stimuli. No training effect was found, supporting the resource competition explanation for the previous findings.