An Eye-tracking Study to Investigate Oxytocin Effect on Attention Inhibition

The cognitive control of attention towards neutral and emotional stimuli represents a key functional domain and disruptions in this domain have been associated with a range of psychiatric disorders. Saccadic eye movement tasks have been used to assess individual differences in the cognitive control of attention and alterations in psychiatric disorders. Recent evidence suggests that the hypothalamic neuropeptide Oxytocin (OXT) may modulate attention allocation and regulation. To this end the present randomized between-subject placebo-controlled experiment examined whether intranasal OXT modulates behavior in an eye-tracking saccade / anti-saccade paradigm in healthy male subjects. The paradigm used non-social (neutral shape) as well as social (happy, sad, angry, fear, and neutral faces) stimuli to explore emotion-specific effects of OXT.