Neural and behavioral effects of modification of visual attention in body dysmorphic disorder
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In individuals with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), perceptual appearance distortions may be related to selective attention biases and aberrant visual scanning, contributing to imbalances in global vs. detailed visual processing. Treatments for the core symptom of perceptual distortions are underexplored in BDD; yet understanding their mechanistic effects on brain function is critical for rational treatment development. This study tested a behavioral strategy of visual-attention modification on visual system brain connectivity and eye behaviors. We acquired fMRI data in 37 unmedicated adults with BDD and 30 healthy controls. Participants viewed their faces naturalistically (naturalistic viewing), and holding their gaze on the image center (modulated viewing), monitored with an eye-tracking camera. We analyzed dynamic effective connectivity and visual fixation duration. Modulated viewing resulted in longer mean visual fixation duration compared to during naturalistic viewing, across groups. Further, modulated viewing resulted in stronger connectivity from occipital to parietal dorsal visual stream regions, also evident during the subsequent naturalistic viewing, compared with the initial naturalistic viewing, in BDD. Longer fixation duration was associated with a trend for stronger connectivity during modulated viewing. Those with more severe BDD symptoms had weaker dorsal visual stream connectivity during naturalistic viewing, and those with more negative appearance evaluations had weaker connectivity during modulated viewing. In sum, holding a constant gaze on a non-concerning area of one's face may confer increased communication in the occipital/parietal dorsal visual stream, facilitating global/holistic visual processing. This effect shows persistence during subsequent naturalistic viewing. Results have implications for perceptual retraining treatment designs.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it