Toward video-LLM driven workflow for behavioral segmentation and scoring in mice performing a skilled water-reaching task: an evaluation of recent LLM models.

Threat-related attentional processes, namely biased attention toward threat, has been highlighted as an important mechanism in the developmental unfolding of childhood anxiety and stress-related disorders. The dot probe task is a widely used measure of bias to threat that also enables examination of other dimensions of attentional processes, namely orientation to and disengagement from threat, which are more rarely examined in relation to trauma and child psychopathology. The current study employs a novel approach to scoring the dot probe task to examine the relationship between dimensions of threat-related attentional processes, trauma exposure, and children’s anxiety and post-traumatic stress symptoms in a sample of preschool children. There is growing evidence that threat-related attentional processes unfold dynamically over time and vary across contexts, playing a key role in the developmental pathways of children’s psychopathology, particularly within the context of trauma, such as violence and abuse. Experiences of abuse and trauma likely shape children’s bias toward, or vigilance toward, threat by conditioning them to detect threat early in order to adapt and identify signs of danger/anger more quickly (). Indeed, higher vigilance (i.e., bias toward threat) has been found among preschool-aged children exposed to abuse (). These findings parallel adult studies which demonstrate increases in bias to threat after exposure to combat and other forms of violence (). Longitudinal studies extend the cross-sectional work by highlighting the temporally dynamic nature of threat biases and symptomatology. Attentional patterns of vigilance and avoidance appear to not be static traits but to shift across children’s development and in response to environmental context. For example, in a sample of preschool-aged children with varied exposure to trauma, more pronounced attentional vigilance (i.e., bias to threat) in an initial lab visit was related to trauma symptoms 9 months later, associations notably not found in cross-sectional data, highlighting how early vigilance may precede and shape later symptomatology (). In contrast, exposure to stressors such as maltreatment and other trauma in samples under age of six has been linked to stronger avoidance attentional patterns (i.e., attention bias away from angry faces) later in childhood (), which may emerge to adapt to chronic stress in childhood.