Attention is when our minds are taken over by one among several competing objects or thoughts. Attentional bias occurs when aspects of the context lead us to pay more attention to some objects or thoughts than others. How our minds select the object or thought depends on many factors. One factor that increases attention towards certain objects or thoughts is the salience of individuals’ attributes, such as race.  People may unconsciously pay more attention to individuals from their in-group – i.e., in-group attentional bias. In the pandemic, life-saving equipment has often been in short supply. We asked whether white medical students would pay more attention to medical resources after seeing white faces, than after seeing black faces. An affirmative answer could suggest that white doctors might be more likely to offer scare medical resources to white patients than to black ones.

The study sought to explore whether exposure to intensive care stimuli increases the attention of white medical students, relative to neutral stimuli, and whether attention to intensive care stimuli increases when preceded by white faces (vs. black faces). To accomplish this goal, we recruited 167 white medical students online from different faculties of medicine in Portugal. Participants used their personal computers. After completing the consent section, participants read a brief description about the scarcity of intensive care resources in the pandemic, which was designed to give them a scarcity mindset. Then, a white male face or a black male face flashed briefly on the participant’s screen. The exposure was subliminal, meaning that the image disappeared from the screen so quickly that the participant would not become consciously aware of having seen it. Afterwards, each participant saw eight pairs of intensive care/neutral stimuli four times each (for a total of 32 times). One intensive care and one neutral object were presented either in the screen’s right or left for 1000 milliseconds. Finally, a dot appeared randomly in place of one of the previously seen objects (intensive care or neutral object), depending on the experimental condition (see figure 3). The participant’s task was to detect the location of the dot and to indicate its location (left or right) using the keyboard. A shorter time for recording the dot’s location implies a faster reaction to that stimulus, which in turn suggests that the participant’s attention had been oriented to the stimulus (intensive care or neutral) that preceded the dot.

A linear mixed model was developed, taking the participants’ latency responses as the dependent variable, and racial category (black vs. white) and type of stimulus (intensive care vs. neutral) as between-subject independent variables. The means are presented in figure 4. Participants were significantly faster at detecting the dot when it replaced an intensive care stimulus (M = 372, SD = 5.15) compared to trials where the dot replaced a neutral stimulus (M = 389; SD = 5.84), B = 17.22, t= 2.21, p = .03.   This suggests an attentional bias toward intensive care stimuli. The results showed no evidence that participants were faster for the white faces (M = 378, SD = 5.54), compared with the black faces (M = 383, SD = 5.48), t(167)= -.62, p = 0.54.  Finally, as to a possible interaction between racial category (black vs. white) and type of stimulus (intensive care vs. neutral), no significant interaction was found, B = -0.807, t = -.05, p = 0.96. 

This study has extended the research on selective attention to the medical domain, using an attentional paradigm originally designed to measure attentional bias toward threatening vs. neutral objects. The dot-probe paradigm was successful in capturing attentional bias in a novel context, suggesting that it can be used in future medical studies. Contrary to the researchers’ expectations, white medical students didn’t pay more attention to intensive care stimuli when primed with a white face vs. a black face (that is, they didn’t show in-group attentional bias). However, this finding could be the result of the small sample size. In the next phase, the study will be replicated with a sample of over 200 participants. 

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