Can we dissociate hypervigilance to social threats from altered perceptual decision-making processes in lonely individuals? An exploration with Drift Diffusion Modeling and event-related potentials

It has been hypothesized that lonely individuals demonstrate hypervigilance toward social threats. However, recent studies have raised doubts about the reliability of tasks commonly used to measure attentional biases toward threats. Two alternative approaches have been suggested to overcome the limitations of traditional analysis of attentional bias. First, the neurophysiological indicators of orienting to threats were shown to have superior psychometric characteristics compared to overt measures of behavioral performance. The second approach involves utilizing computational modeling to isolate latent components corresponding to specific cognitive mechanisms from observable data. To test the usefulness of these approaches in loneliness research, we analyzed behavioral and electroencephalographic (EEG) data from 26 lonely and 26 non-lonely participants who performed a dot-probe task using a computational modeling approach. We applied the Drift Diffusion Model (DDM) and extracted N2pc-an event-related potential that serves as an indicator of spatial attention. No evidence for social threat hypervigilance has been found in DDM parameters nor in N2pc characteristics in the current study. However, we did observe decreased drift rate and increased variability in drift rate between trials within the lonely group, indicating reduced efficiency in perceptual decision-making among lonely individuals. These effects were not detected using standard behavioral measures used in the dot-probe paradigm. Given that DDM indicators were sensitive to differences in perceptual discrimination between the two groups, even when no overt differences were found in standard behavioral measures, it may be postulated that computational approaches offer a more comprehensive understanding of cognitive processes.