Attentional bias

Several types of cognitive bias occur due to an attentional bias. One example is when a person does not examine all possible outcomes when making a judgment about a correlation or association. They may focus on one or two possibilities, while ignoring the rest. The most commonly studied type of decision for attentional bias, is one in which there are two conditions (A and B), which can be present(P) or not present(N). This leaves four possible combination outcomes: Both are present (AP/BP), Both are not present (AN/BN), Only A is present (AP/BN), Only B is present (AN/BP). This can be better shown in table form:

Attentional biases also can influence what people are more likely to look at. For instance, patients with anxiety disorders show increased attention to threatening faces in studies using the dot-probe paradigm.