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Biological Psychology Sep 2023Transcranial direct current stimulation targeting lateral prefrontal areas may attenuate attentional vigilance for negative content and reduce emotional reactivity....
Transcranial direct current stimulation targeting lateral prefrontal areas may attenuate attentional vigilance for negative content and reduce emotional reactivity. However, little research to date has examined how such stimulation may affect attention towards and emotional reactivity to positive emotional content. The aim of this study was to examine whether anodal tDCS targeting the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex would affect attentional bias towards either or both negative and positive content, and similarly, how it would impact emotional reactivity to negative and positive emotional content among healthy individuals. Unselected participants (N = 101) were recruited (M = 22.57, SD = 5.60; 66.33% female) and allocated to either an active or sham tDCS condition. Attentional bias was measured using an eye-tracking task involving negative-neutral and positive-neutral image pairs, followed by an emotional reactivity assessment task involving negative and positive video content (self-report and heart rate variability). Results showed no evidence that tDCS influenced attentional patterns towards either positive or negative information, nor was there evidence that tDCS influenced self-reported anxious mood or physiological arousal. However, participants in the active tDCS condition reported higher positive mood in response to both the positive and negative videos compared to those in the sham condition and also higher arousal in response to positive content and lower arousal in response to negative content, with those in the sham tDCS condition showing the reverse pattern of effects. As such, tDCS effects on emotional reactivity to positive and negative content were restricted to self-report measures.
Topics: Humans; Female; Young Adult; Adult; Male; Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation; Attention; Emotions; Affect; Attentional Bias; Prefrontal Cortex
PubMed: 37453731
DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2023.108640 -
Psychological Medicine Dec 2023Dissociative symptoms can emerge after trauma and interfere with attentional control and interoception; disruptions to these processes are barriers to mind-body...
BACKGROUND
Dissociative symptoms can emerge after trauma and interfere with attentional control and interoception; disruptions to these processes are barriers to mind-body interventions such as breath-focused mindfulness (BFM). To overcome these barriers, we tested the use of an exteroceptive augmentation to BFM, using vibrations equivalent to the amplitude of the auditory waveform of the actual breath, delivered via a wearable subwoofer in real time (VBFM). We tested whether this device enhanced interoceptive processes, attentional control and autonomic regulation in trauma-exposed women with dissociative symptoms.
METHODS
65 women, majority (82%) Black American, aged 18-65 completed self-report measures of interoception and 6 BFM sessions, during which electrocardiographic recordings were taken to derive high-frequency heart rate variability (HRV) estimates. A subset ( = 31) of participants completed functional MRI at pre- and post-intervention, during which they were administered an affective attentional control task.
RESULTS
Compared to those who received BFM only, women who received VBFM demonstrated greater increases in interoception, particularly their ability to trust body signals, increased sustained attention, as well as increased connectivity between nodes of emotion processing and interoceptive networks. Intervention condition moderated the relationship between interoception change and dissociation change, as well as the relationship between dissociation and HRV change.
CONCLUSIONS
Vibration feedback during breath focus yielded greater improvements in interoception, sustained attention and increased connectivity of emotion processing and interoceptive networks. Augmenting BFM with vibration appears to have considerable effects on interoception, attention and autonomic regulation; it could be used as a monotherapy or to address trauma treatment barriers.
Topics: Humans; Female; Awareness; Interoception; Mindfulness; Attention; Emotions; Heart Rate
PubMed: 37144411
DOI: 10.1017/S0033291723001277 -
Child Development 2024Adhering to a partially defined plan requires an intentional commitment that curbs distracting desires conflicting with the planned course of action, enabling humans to...
Adhering to a partially defined plan requires an intentional commitment that curbs distracting desires conflicting with the planned course of action, enabling humans to act coherently over time. Two studies (N = 50, 27 girls, ages 5-6, Han Chinese, in Hangzhou, China, 2022.02-2022.03) explored the development of commitment to partial plans in a sequential decision-making task and the underlying cognitive capacity focusing on its correlation to attentional control. Results suggest that only 6-year-olds committed to partial plans (d = .51), and children's commitment ratio was positively correlated with the use of proactive control (r = .40). These findings indicate that intentional commitment does not develop simultaneously with intention understanding, but rather matures gradually with the development of attentional control.
Topics: Child; Female; Humans; Intention; Attention; China
PubMed: 37337790
DOI: 10.1111/cdev.13955 -
Quarterly Journal of Experimental... Oct 2023A large body of research suggests that previously reward-associated stimuli can capture attention. Recent evidence also suggests that value-driven attentional biases can...
A large body of research suggests that previously reward-associated stimuli can capture attention. Recent evidence also suggests that value-driven attentional biases can occur for a particular category of objects. However, it is unclear how broadly these category-level attentional biases can generalise. In the present study, we examined whether value-driven attentional biases can generalise to new exemplars of a category or semantically related categories using a modified version of the value-driven attentional capture paradigm. In an initial training phase, participants searched for two categories of objects and were rewarded for correctly fixating members of one target category. In a subsequent test phase, participants searched for two new categories of objects. A new exemplar of one of the previous target categories or a member of a semantically related category could appear as a critical distractor in this phase. Participants were more likely to initially fixate the critical distractor and fixated the distractor longer when it was a new exemplar of the previously rewarded category. However, similar findings were not observed for members of semantically related categories. Together, these findings suggest that the generalisation of value-based attentional priority is category-specific.
Topics: Humans; Attention; Generalization, Psychological; Attentional Bias; Reward; Photic Stimulation; Reaction Time
PubMed: 36453711
DOI: 10.1177/17470218221144318 -
Trends in Neurosciences Feb 2024The pulvinar nucleus of the thalamus is a crucial component of the visual system and plays significant roles in sensory processing and cognitive integration. The... (Review)
Review
The pulvinar nucleus of the thalamus is a crucial component of the visual system and plays significant roles in sensory processing and cognitive integration. The pulvinar's extensive connectivity with cortical regions allows for bidirectional communication, contributing to the integration of sensory information across the visual hierarchy. Recent findings underscore the pulvinar's involvement in attentional modulation, feature binding, and predictive coding. In this review, we highlight recent advances in clarifying the pulvinar's circuitry and function. We discuss the contributions of the pulvinar to signal modulation across the global cortical network and place these findings within theoretical frameworks of cortical processing, particularly the global neuronal workspace (GNW) theory and predictive coding.
Topics: Humans; Pulvinar; Thalamus; Visual Perception; Attention; Sensation
PubMed: 38143202
DOI: 10.1016/j.tins.2023.11.008 -
Proceedings of the National Academy of... Apr 2024Research on attentional selection of stimulus features has yielded seemingly contradictory results. On the one hand, many experiments in humans and animals have observed...
Research on attentional selection of stimulus features has yielded seemingly contradictory results. On the one hand, many experiments in humans and animals have observed a "global" facilitation of attended features across the entire visual field, even when spatial attention is focused on a single location. On the other hand, several event-related potential studies in humans reported that attended features are enhanced at the attended location only. The present experiment demonstrates that these conflicting results can be explained by differences in the timing of attentional allocation inside and outside the spatial focus of attention. Participants attended to fields of either red or blue randomly moving dots on either the left or right side of fixation with the task of detecting brief coherent motion targets. Recordings of steady-state visual evoked potentials elicited by the flickering stimuli allowed concurrent measurement of the time course of feature-selective attention in visual cortex on both the attended and the unattended sides. The onset of feature-selective attentional modulation on the attended side occurred around 150 ms earlier than on the unattended side. This finding that feature-selective attention is not spatially global from the outset but extends to unattended locations after a temporal delay resolves previous contradictions between studies finding global versus hierarchical selection of features and provides insight into the fundamental relationship between feature-based and location-based (spatial) attention mechanisms.
Topics: Humans; Evoked Potentials, Visual; Electroencephalography; Evoked Potentials; Visual Fields; Attention; Photic Stimulation
PubMed: 38588433
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2309975121 -
Cortex; a Journal Devoted To the Study... Jul 2024Selective attention is a cognitive function that helps filter out unwanted information. Theories such as the biased competition model (Desimone & Duncan, 1995) explain...
Selective attention is a cognitive function that helps filter out unwanted information. Theories such as the biased competition model (Desimone & Duncan, 1995) explain how attentional templates bias processing towards targets in contexts where multiple stimuli compete for resources. However, it is unclear how the anticipation of different levels of competition influences the nature of attentional templates, in a proactive fashion. In this study, we used electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate how the anticipated demands of attentional selection (either high or low stimuli competition contexts) modulate target-specific preparatory brain activity and its relationship with task performance. To do so, participants performed a sex/gender judgment task in a cue-target paradigm where, depending on the block, target and distractor stimuli appeared simultaneously (high competition) or sequentially (low competition). Multivariate Pattern Analysis (MVPA) showed that, in both competition contexts, there was a preactivation of the target category to select, with a ramping-up profile at the end of the preparatory interval. However, cross-classification showed no generalization across competition conditions, suggesting different preparatory formats. Notably, time-frequency analyses showed differences between anticipated competition demands, with higher theta band power for high than low competition, which mediated the impact of subsequent stimuli competition on behavioral performance. Overall, our results show that, whereas preactivation of the internal templates associated with the category to select are engaged in advance in high and low competition contexts, their underlying neural patterns differ. In addition, these codes could not be associated with theta power, suggesting that they reflect different preparatory processes. The implications of these findings are crucial to increase our understanding of the nature of top-down processes across different contexts.
Topics: Humans; Male; Female; Attention; Electroencephalography; Young Adult; Adult; Reaction Time; Brain; Cues; Psychomotor Performance; Judgment
PubMed: 38772050
DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2024.04.009 -
Attention, Perception & Psychophysics Oct 2023Where and what we attend is very much determined by what we have encountered in the past. Recent studies have shown that people learn to extract statistical regularities...
Where and what we attend is very much determined by what we have encountered in the past. Recent studies have shown that people learn to extract statistical regularities in the environment resulting in attentional suppression of locations that were likely to contain a distractor, effectively reducing the amount of attentional capture. Here, we asked whether this suppression effect due to statistical learning is dependent on the specific configuration within which it was learned. The current study employed the additional singleton paradigm using search arrays that had a configuration consisting of set sizes of either four or 10 items. Each configuration contained its own high probability distractor location. If learning would generalize across set size configurations, both high probability locations would be suppressed equally, regardless of set size. However, if learning to suppress is dependent on the configuration within which it was learned, one would expect only suppression of the high probability location that matched the configuration within which it was learned. The results show the latter, suggesting that implicitly learned suppression is configuration-dependent. Thus, we conclude that the high probability location is learned within the configuration context within which it is presented.
Topics: Humans; Learning; Attention; Reaction Time
PubMed: 37258893
DOI: 10.3758/s13414-023-02732-2 -
Cortex; a Journal Devoted To the Study... Dec 2023There is a growing interest in the relationship between mental images and attentional templates as both are considered pictorial representations that involve similar...
There is a growing interest in the relationship between mental images and attentional templates as both are considered pictorial representations that involve similar neural mechanisms. Here, we investigated the role of mental imagery in the automatic implementation of attentional templates and their effect on involuntary attention. We developed a novel version of the contingent capture paradigm designed to encourage the generation of a new template on each trial and measure contingent spatial capture by a template-matching visual feature (color). Participants were required to search at four different locations for a specific object indicated at the start of each trial. Immediately prior to the search display, color cues were presented surrounding the potential target locations, one of which matched the target color (e.g., red for strawberry). Across three experiments, our task induced a robust contingent capture effect, reflected by faster responses when the target appeared in the location previously occupied by the target-matching cue. Contrary to our predictions, this effect remained consistent regardless of self-reported individual differences in visual mental imagery (Experiment 1, N = 216) or trial-by-trial variation of voluntary imagery vividness (Experiment 2, N = 121). Moreover, contingent capture was observed even among aphantasic participants, who report no imagery (Experiment 3, N = 91). The magnitude of the effect was not reduced in aphantasics compared to a control sample of non-aphantasics, although the two groups reported substantial differences in their search strategy and exhibited differences in overall speed and accuracy. Our results hence establish a dissociation between the generation and implementation of attentional templates for a visual feature (color) and subjectively experienced imagery.
Topics: Humans; Attention; Cues; Imagery, Psychotherapy; Self Report; Individuality; Visual Perception; Reaction Time; Color Perception
PubMed: 37967476
DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2023.09.014 -
Human Factors Feb 2024This study investigated the effect of the spatial disorientation (SD) events on an attentive blank stare in the cockpit scene and demonstrated how much the flight task...
OBJECTIVE
This study investigated the effect of the spatial disorientation (SD) events on an attentive blank stare in the cockpit scene and demonstrated how much the flight task and visual delayed discrimination task were competing for the pilots' attention.
BACKGROUND
SD in flight is the leading cause of human error-related aircraft accidents in the military, general and commercial aviation, and has been an unsolved problem since the inception of flight. In-flight safety research, visually scanning cockpit instruments, and detecting changes are critical countermeasures against SD.
METHOD
Thirty male military pilots were performing a dual task involving piloting a flight simulator and visual change detection, while eye movements were obtained using an eye tracker.
RESULTS
Pilots made more flight errors and spent less time gazing at the area of change in SD-conflict than in non-conflict flights. The vestibular origin SD-conflict led not only to deteriorated piloting and visual scanning but also to problems coordinating overt and covert attention, resulting in lower noticeability of visual changes despite gazing at them.
CONCLUSION
Our study shows that looking at a given area in space is not a sufficient condition for effective covert attention allocation and the correct response to a visual stimulus. It seems to be important to make pilots aware of this during SD training.
APPLICATION
To reduce change blindness, some strategies, such as reducing the number of secondary tasks is extremely valuable. Particular efforts should also be focused on improving the design of the aircraft cockpit by increasing the conspicuousness of critical information.
Topics: Humans; Male; Task Performance and Analysis; Attention; Awareness; Aviation; Confusion; Aircraft; Pilots
PubMed: 35574598
DOI: 10.1177/00187208221093827