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Clinical Psychology Review Aug 2019Attentional Control Theory (ACT) (Eysenck & Derakshan, 2011) proposes that attention control (AC) deficits are central to the development of anxiety. This meta-analysis... (Meta-Analysis)
Meta-Analysis Review
Attentional Control Theory (ACT) (Eysenck & Derakshan, 2011) proposes that attention control (AC) deficits are central to the development of anxiety. This meta-analysis investigated the size and nature of AC deficits in anxious compared to non-anxious participants. We made the following hypotheses based on ACT: i) anxiety-related AC deficits occur in the AC components of inhibition and switching, but not updating; ii) deficits will be more pronounced for AC efficiency (reaction times) than effectiveness (accuracy); iii) studies with high cognitive load conditions will observe greater deficits than studies with normal cognitive load; iv) age and anxiety level will moderate the effect of anxiety on AC. Fifty-eight studies (N = 8292) met inclusion criteria. The meta-analysis revealed a significant AC deficit for high compared to low anxiety participants (Hedges' g = -0.58). Overall, results supported assumptions of ACT: anxiety produced significant deficits in AC efficiency but not effectiveness; these deficits occurred in inhibition and switching but not updating and studies with high cognitive load conditions found larger anxiety related AC deficits. Age moderated the relationship between anxiety and AC in behavioural studies and anxiety severity moderated this relationship in self-report studies. Theoretical implications of the results are discussed, and future directions for research are proposed. This meta-analysis has been registered with PROSPERO in 2016, Registration number: CRD42016036927.
Topics: Anxiety Disorders; Attention; Executive Function; Humans; Inhibition, Psychological
PubMed: 31306935
DOI: 10.1016/j.cpr.2019.101754 -
Scientific Reports Apr 2022There is substantial evidence that learning and using multiple languages modulates selective attention in children. The current study investigated the mechanisms that...
There is substantial evidence that learning and using multiple languages modulates selective attention in children. The current study investigated the mechanisms that drive this modification. Specifically, we asked whether the need for constant management of competing languages in bilinguals increases attentional capacity, or draws on the available resources such that they need to be economised to support optimal task performance. Monolingual and bilingual children aged 7-12 attended to a narrative presented in one ear, while ignoring different types of interference in the other ear. We used EEG to capture the neural encoding of attended and unattended speech envelopes, and assess how well they can be reconstructed from the responses of the neuronal populations that encode them. Despite equivalent behavioral performance, monolingual and bilingual children encoded attended speech differently, with the pattern of encoding across conditions in bilinguals suggesting a redistribution of the available attentional capacity, rather than its enhancement.
Topics: Attention; Child; Humans; Language; Multilingualism; Speech; Speech Perception
PubMed: 35430617
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-09989-x -
Journal of Experimental Psychology.... Sep 2022When interacting with the environment, humans exhibit robust biases toward information that pertains to themselves: Self-relevant information is processed faster and...
When interacting with the environment, humans exhibit robust biases toward information that pertains to themselves: Self-relevant information is processed faster and yields more accurate responses than information linked to others. Recent studies have shown that simple social associations can lead to the instant deployment of this benefit in the processing of abstract stimuli. However, how self-prioritization evolves across the processing hierarchy has been a subject of intense debate. Furthermore, there is little empirical evidence about the functional efficiency of social relevance in natural environments in which information is present across multiple senses. Across three experiments (each = 40), the present study shows that self-prioritization effects (a) can arise in simple audio-visual numerosity judgements, (b) can be efficiently deployed across the senses by funneling perception toward self-relevant information in the more reliable sensory modality, and (c) modulate the integration of auditory and visual information into a multisensory representation. Taken together, the present findings suggest that social relevance can influence multisensory processing at both perceptual and postperceptual stages via early attentional modulations of sensory integration and later, task-dependent attentional control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
Topics: Acoustic Stimulation; Attention; Auditory Perception; Humans; Photic Stimulation; Visual Perception
PubMed: 35446086
DOI: 10.1037/xhp0001013 -
Attention, Perception & Psychophysics Feb 2020The ability to visually search, quickly and accurately, for designated items in cluttered environments is crucial for many species to ensure survival. Feature... (Review)
Review
The ability to visually search, quickly and accurately, for designated items in cluttered environments is crucial for many species to ensure survival. Feature integration theory, one of the most influential theories of attention, suggests that certain visual features that facilitate this search are extracted pre-attentively in a parallel fashion across the visual field during early visual processing. Hence, if some objects of interest possess such a feature uniquely, it will pop out from the background during the integration stage and draw visual attention immediately and effortlessly. For years, visual search research has explored these ideas by investigating the conditions (and visual features) that characterize efficient versus inefficient visual searches. The bulk of research has focused on human vision, though ecologically there are many reasons to believe that feature integration theory is applicable to other species as well. Here we review the main findings regarding the relevance of feature integration theory to non-human species and expand it to new research on one particular animal model - the archerfish. Specifically, we study both archerfish and humans in an extensive and comparative set of visual-search experiments. The findings indicate that both species exhibit similar behavior in basic feature searches and in conjunction search tasks. In contrast, performance differed in searches defined by shape. These results suggest that evolution pressured many visual features to pop out for both species despite cardinal differences in brain anatomy and living environment, and strengthens the argument that aspects of feature integration theory may be generalizable across the animal kingdom.
Topics: Animals; Attention; Fishes; Humans; Perches; Visual Perception
PubMed: 31898075
DOI: 10.3758/s13414-019-01884-4 -
The Journal of Nervous and Mental... Mar 2021People with schizophrenia often experience attentional impairments that hinder learning during psychological interventions. Attention shaping is a behavioral technique...
People with schizophrenia often experience attentional impairments that hinder learning during psychological interventions. Attention shaping is a behavioral technique that improves attentiveness in this population. Because reinforcement learning (RL) is thought to be the mechanism by which attention shaping operates, we investigated if preshaping RL performance predicted level of response to attention shaping in people with schizophrenia. Contrary to hypotheses, a steeper attentiveness growth curve was predicted by less intact pretreatment RL ability and lower baseline attentiveness, accounting for 59% of the variance. Moreover, baseline attentiveness accounted for over 13 times more variance in response to attention shaping than did RL ability. Results suggest attention shaping is most effective for lower-functioning patients, and those high in RL ability may already be close to ceiling in terms of their response to reinforcers. Attention shaping may not be a primarily RL-driven intervention, and other mechanisms of its effects should be considered.
Topics: Adult; Attention; Cognition; Female; Humans; Intelligence; Male; Reinforcement, Psychology; Schizophrenia; Schizophrenic Psychology
PubMed: 33315800
DOI: 10.1097/NMD.0000000000001286 -
Current Opinion in Psychology Oct 2019We review recent evidence for the hemispheric lateralization of attentional systems in the human brain. There is abundant anatomical, neuroimaging, and neuromodulatory... (Review)
Review
We review recent evidence for the hemispheric lateralization of attentional systems in the human brain. There is abundant anatomical, neuroimaging, and neuromodulatory evidence for a relative lateralization toward the right hemisphere of some of the cortical networks supporting the attentional systems, especially those including the temporo-parietal junction and the ventro-lateral prefrontal cortex. Damage or disconnection of these right-lateralized nodes may produce severe deficits of spatial and nonspatial attention, as in visual neglect, or of inhibitory control. Finally, we examine the possibility that some of these hemispheric asymmetries are not only exclusive to the human brain, but may also be instrumental in prioritizing information in non-human animals.
Topics: Animals; Attention; Brain; Brain Mapping; Female; Functional Laterality; Humans; Prefrontal Cortex
PubMed: 30711910
DOI: 10.1016/j.copsyc.2018.12.023 -
Medicine Nov 2022Behavioral and neurophysiological experiments have demonstrated that distinct and common cognitive processes and associated neural substrates maintain allocentric and... (Review)
Review
Behavioral and neurophysiological experiments have demonstrated that distinct and common cognitive processes and associated neural substrates maintain allocentric and egocentric spatial representations. This review aimed to provide evidence from previous behavioral and neurophysiological studies on collating cognitive processes and associated neural substrates and linking them to the state of visuospatial representations in patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Even though MCI patients showed impaired visuospatial attentional processing and working memory, previous neuropsychological experiments in MCI largely emphasized memory impairment and lacked substantiating evidence of whether memory impairment could be associated with how patients with MCI encode objects in space. The present review suggests that impaired memory capacity is linked to impaired allocentric representation in MCI patients. This review indicates that further research is needed to examine how the decline in visuospatial attentional resources during allocentric coding of space could be linked to working memory impairment.
Topics: Humans; Neuropsychological Tests; Cognitive Dysfunction; Memory, Short-Term; Memory Disorders; Attention
PubMed: 36343037
DOI: 10.1097/MD.0000000000031462 -
Journal of Vision Aug 2021Attentional processes are generally assumed to be involved in multiple object tracking (MOT). The attentional capture paradigm is regularly used to study conditions of...
Attentional processes are generally assumed to be involved in multiple object tracking (MOT). The attentional capture paradigm is regularly used to study conditions of attentional control. It has up to now not been used to assess influences of sudden onset distractor stimuli in MOT. We investigated whether attentional capture does occur in MOT: Are onset distractors processed at all in dynamic attentional tasks? We found that sudden onset distractors were effective in lowering probe detection, thus demonstrating attentional capture. Tracking performance as dependent measure was not affected. The attentional capture effect persisted in conditions of higher tracking load (Experiment 2) and was dramatically increased in lower presentation frequency of the onset distractor (Experiment 3). Tracking performance was shown to suffer only when onset distractors were presented serially with very short time gaps in between, thus effectively disturbing re-engaging attention on the tracking set (Experiment 4). We discuss that rapid dis- and re-engagement of the attention process on target objects and an additional more basic process that continuously provides location information allow managing strong disruptions of attention during tracking.
Topics: Attention; Humans
PubMed: 34379083
DOI: 10.1167/jov.21.8.16 -
Annual International Conference of the... Jul 2023Depression is a common mental disorder that negatively affects physical health and personal, social and occupational functioning. Currently, accurate and objective...
Depression is a common mental disorder that negatively affects physical health and personal, social and occupational functioning. Currently, accurate and objective diagnosis of depression remains challenging, and electroencephalography (EEG) provides promising clinical practice or home use due to considerable performance and low cost. This work investigates the capabilities of deep neural networks with EEG-based neural patterns from both resting states and cognitive tasks for depression detection. We collect EEG signals from 33 depressed patients and 40 healthy controls using wearable dry electrodes and build Attentive Simple Graph Convolutional network and Transformer neural network for objective depression detection. Four experiment stages, including two resting states and two cognitive tasks, are designed to characterize the alteration of relevant neural patterns in the depressed patients, in terms of decreased energy and impaired performance in sustained attention and response inhibition. The Transformer model achieves an AUC of 0.94 on the Continuous Performance Test-Identical Pairs version (sensitivity: 0.87, specificity: 0.91) and the Stroop Color Word Test (sensitivity: 0.93, specificity: 0.88), and an AUC of 0.89 on the two resting states (sensitivity: 0.85 and 0.87, specificity: 0.88 and 0.90, respectively), indicating the potential of EEG-based neural patterns in identifying depression. These findings provide new insights into the research of depression mechanisms and EEG-based depression biomarkers.
Topics: Humans; Depression; Neural Networks, Computer; Attention; Electroencephalography; Cognition
PubMed: 38083722
DOI: 10.1109/EMBC40787.2023.10340667 -
Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews.... 2024Real-world environments are multisensory, meaningful, and highly complex. To parse these environments in a highly efficient manner, a subset of this information must be... (Review)
Review
Real-world environments are multisensory, meaningful, and highly complex. To parse these environments in a highly efficient manner, a subset of this information must be selected both within and across modalities. However, the bulk of attention research has been conducted within sensory modalities, with a particular focus on vision. Visual attention research has made great strides, with over a century of research methodically identifying the underlying mechanisms that allow us to select critical visual information. Spatial attention, attention to features, and object-based attention have all been studied extensively. More recently, research has established semantics (meaning) as a key component to allocating attention in real-world scenes, with the meaning of an item or environment affecting visual attentional selection. However, a full understanding of how semantic information modulates real-world attention requires studying more than vision in isolation. The world provides semantic information across all senses, but with this extra information comes greater complexity. Here, we summarize visual attention (including semantic-based visual attention), crossmodal attention, and argue for the importance of studying crossmodal semantic guidance of attention. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Attention Psychology > Perception and Psychophysics.
Topics: Attention; Humans; Semantics; Visual Perception
PubMed: 38243393
DOI: 10.1002/wcs.1675