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PloS One 2015Spatial terms such as "above", "in front of", and "on the left of" are all essential for describing the location of one object relative to another object in everyday... (Review)
Review
Spatial terms such as "above", "in front of", and "on the left of" are all essential for describing the location of one object relative to another object in everyday communication. Apprehending such spatial relations involves relating linguistic to object representations by means of attention. This requires at least one attentional shift, and models such as the Attentional Vector Sum (AVS) predict the direction of that attention shift, from the sausage to the box for spatial utterances such as "The box is above the sausage". To the extent that this prediction generalizes to overt gaze shifts, a listener's visual attention should shift from the sausage to the box. However, listeners tend to rapidly look at referents in their order of mention and even anticipate them based on linguistic cues, a behavior that predicts a converse attentional shift from the box to the sausage. Four eye-tracking experiments assessed the role of overt attention in spatial language comprehension by examining to which extent visual attention is guided by words in the utterance and to which extent it also shifts "against the grain" of the unfolding sentence. The outcome suggests that comprehenders' visual attention is predominantly guided by their interpretation of the spatial description. Visual shifts against the grain occurred only when comprehenders had some extra time, and their absence did not affect comprehension accuracy. However, the timing of this reverse gaze shift on a trial correlated with that trial's verification time. Thus, while the timing of these gaze shifts is subtly related to the verification time, their presence is not necessary for successful verification of spatial relations.
Topics: Attention; Comprehension; Humans; Language; Vision, Ocular
PubMed: 25607540
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0115758 -
Current Opinion in Psychology Oct 2019Physically salient stimuli, such as uniquely colored objects, seem to have an inherent power to capture our attention, but formal research on this topic has produced... (Review)
Review
Physically salient stimuli, such as uniquely colored objects, seem to have an inherent power to capture our attention, but formal research on this topic has produced conflicting results and theories. Here, we review evidence that the attentional capture debate can be resolved by positing a new suppressive process. This suppressive process can occur before attentional shifting to prevent salient items from attracting attention. In the current article, we review converging evidence that salient items are suppressed to avoid attentional capture comes from studies of psychophysics, eye movements, single-unit recordings, and event-related potentials (ERPs). Crucially, the ability to inhibit salient distractors seems to be learned as participants gain experience with the simple features of the to-be-ignored stimuli.
Topics: Attention; Evoked Potentials; Eye Movements; Humans; Inhibition, Psychological; Psychophysics
PubMed: 30415087
DOI: 10.1016/j.copsyc.2018.10.013 -
Scandinavian Journal of Pain Jul 2021It has been hypothesised that attentional bias to environmental threats can contribute to persistent pain. It is unclear whether people with acute low back pain (LBP)...
OBJECTIVES
It has been hypothesised that attentional bias to environmental threats can contribute to persistent pain. It is unclear whether people with acute low back pain (LBP) have an attentional bias to environmental threats. We investigated if attentional bias of threat related words is different in people with acute LBP and pain-free controls.
METHODS
People with acute LBP and pain-free people completed a free viewing eye tracking task. Participants were simultaneously presented with two words, a threat related word and a neutral control word. Threat related words were general threat, affective pain and sensory pain. We conducted linear mixed models to detect differences between acute LBP and pain-free participants on five eye tracking outcome measures (dwell time, first fixation, latency to first fixation, first run dwell time and number of fixations). We calculated absolute reliability, (standard error of measure), and relative reliability (intraclass correlation coefficients [ICC 2,1]) for each eye tracking outcome measures.
RESULTS
We recruited 65 people with acute LBP and 65 pain-free controls. Participants with acute LBP had a higher proportion of fixations towards the affective pain words (=0.5009, 95% CI=0.4941, 0.5076) than the pain-free controls had (=0.4908, 95% CI=0.4836, 0.4979), mean between group difference = -0.0101, 95% CI [-0.0198, -0.0004], p=0.0422. There was no difference between acute LBP and pain-free controls for the remaining eye tracking outcome measures (all p>0.05). The only outcome measure that had an ICC of more than 0.7 was the latency to first fixation (affective pain words ICC=0.73, general threat words ICC=0.72).
CONCLUSIONS
When compared with pain-free controls, people with acute LBP looked more often at affective pain words relative to neutral control words. This may indicate a form of engagement bias for people with acute LBP. Attentional bias was not consistent across outcome measures or word groups. Further research is needed to investigate the potential role of attentional bias in the development of persistent pain.
Topics: Acute Pain; Attention; Attentional Bias; Humans; Low Back Pain; Reproducibility of Results
PubMed: 34019753
DOI: 10.1515/sjpain-2020-0014 -
Journal of Visualized Experiments : JoVE Sep 2017Sustained attention is the ability to monitor intermittent and unpredictable events over a prolonged period of time. This attentional process subserves other aspects of...
Sustained attention is the ability to monitor intermittent and unpredictable events over a prolonged period of time. This attentional process subserves other aspects of cognition and is disrupted in certain neurodevelopmental, neuropsychiatric, and neurodegenerative disorders. Thus, it is clinically important to identify mechanisms that impair and improve sustained attention. Such mechanisms are often first discovered using rodent models. Therefore, several behavior procedures for testing aspects of sustained attention have been developed for rodents. One, first described by McGaughy and Sarter (1995), called the sustained attention task (SAT), trains rats to distinguish between signal (i.e., brief light presentation) and non-signal trials. The signals are short and thus require careful attention to be perceived. Attentional demands can be increased further by introducing a distractor (e.g., flashing houselight). We have modified this task for touchscreen operant chambers, which are configured with a touchscreen on one wall that can present stimuli and record responses. Here we detail our protocol for SAT in touchscreen chambers. Additionally, we present standard measures of performance in male and female Sprague-Dawley rats. Comparable performance on this task in both sexes highlights its use for attention studies, especially as more researchers are including female rodents in their experimental design. Moreover, the easy implementation of SAT for the increasingly popular touchscreen chambers increases its utility.
Topics: Animals; Attention; Conditioning, Operant; Female; Male; Psychomotor Performance; Rats; Rats, Sprague-Dawley
PubMed: 28994786
DOI: 10.3791/56219 -
Europa Medicophysica Mar 2006With its own functional anatomy, circuitry and cellular structure, attention can be viewed as an organ system. This conceptualization reframes many problems in cognitive... (Review)
Review
With its own functional anatomy, circuitry and cellular structure, attention can be viewed as an organ system. This conceptualization reframes many problems in cognitive science and permits important insights into neurological and psychiatric disorders of both children and adults. Specifically, construing attention as an organ system helps to describe the evolutionary and developmental aspects of volitional control, thus paving the road towards a better appreciation of how such factors as genetics and culture influence control systems. The efficiency of the attention networks differs between people. However, these individual differences may elucidate variation in intelligence as well as the ability to regulate affect.
Topics: Attention; Brain; Humans; Individuality; Intelligence
PubMed: 16565687
DOI: No ID Found -
PloS One 2019It has been shown that an averted gaze with emotional expression guides our attention toward a gazed-at location, and the effect of a gaze with fearful expression has... (Clinical Trial)
Clinical Trial
It has been shown that an averted gaze with emotional expression guides our attention toward a gazed-at location, and the effect of a gaze with fearful expression has been well-investigated. However, the findings are not consistent, and most studies used the manual response measure. Recent studies suggest that examining eye movements is more suitable to capture the early stage of the effect of threat-related stimuli on attentional process. Therefore, in the present study, we investigated the effects of static neutral and fearful gaze on overt attention orienting by examining the saccadic responses in an unselected sample of people. Our results found the gaze congruency effects for both expressions, and importantly, enhanced attention orienting by fearful gaze at a short stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA): participants looked faster at the fearful gaze-cued target than the neutral gaze-cued one at the 300 ms SOA. These findings provide the first evidence that fearful averted gaze elicits rapid overt attention orienting toward the target, and suggest that the information of gaze direction and emotional expression are rapidly integrated and modulate the oculomotor system.
Topics: Adult; Attention; Fear; Female; Humans; Male; Saccades
PubMed: 30845154
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0212450 -
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 -
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 -
Journal of Anxiety Disorders Aug 2023Climate change is a serious threat to human health and the awareness of this threat can elicit ecological anxiety (eco-anxiety), which could be considered a rational and...
Climate change is a serious threat to human health and the awareness of this threat can elicit ecological anxiety (eco-anxiety), which could be considered a rational and potentially adaptive response. However, the experience of eco-anxiety does not always lead to adaptive behaviour. The present study investigated whether differential patterns of selective attention towards climate-related information, and variability in this attention, might explain this inconsistent relationship. Participants completed a dot-probe assessment of attentional bias to images of both climate change mitigation strategies and of climate change causes and consequences, and measures of eco-anxiety, climate change belief, environmental self-efficacy, and general psychological symptoms. Engagement in pro-environmental behaviours was measured using a daily behavioural diary. Eco-anxiety and attentional bias independently predicted behaviour, but did not interact. However, attentional bias variability moderated the relationship between eco-anxiety and behaviour, such that higher eco-anxiety predicted greater behavioural engagement, but only when attentional bias variability was low. This was the first known study to examine the potential moderating effect of attentional bias on the relationship between eco-anxiety and pro-environmental behaviours. This growing field of research can help in identifying how the rational response of eco-anxiety can be better harnessed to motivate an adaptive response to the climate crisis.
Topics: Humans; Anxiety; Attention; Anxiety Disorders; Attentional Bias; Climate Change
PubMed: 37480627
DOI: 10.1016/j.janxdis.2023.102745 -
Cognitive Research: Principles and... Jun 2022Statistical knowledge of a target's location may benefit visual search, and rapidly understanding the changes in regularity would increase the adaptability in visual...
Statistical knowledge of a target's location may benefit visual search, and rapidly understanding the changes in regularity would increase the adaptability in visual search situations where fast and accurate performance is required. The current study tested the sources of statistical knowledge-explicitly-given instruction or experience-driven learning-and whether they affect the speed and location spatial attention is guided. Participants performed a visual search task with a statistical regularity to bias one quadrant ("old-rich" condition) in the training phase, followed by another quadrant ("new-rich" condition) in the switching phase. The "instruction" group was explicitly instructed on the regularity, whereas the "no-instruction" group was not. It was expected that the instruction group would rely on goal-driven attention (using regularities with explicit top-down knowledge), and the no-instruction group would rely on habit-like attention (learning regularities through repetitive experiences) in visual search. Compared with the no-instruction group, the instruction group readjusted spatial attention following the regularity switch more rapidly. The instruction group showed greater attentional bias toward the new-rich quadrant than the old-rich quadrant; however, the no-instruction group showed a similar extent of attentional bias to two rich quadrants. The current study suggests that the source of statistical knowledge can affect attentional allocation. Moreover, habit-like attention, a different type of attentional source than goal-driven attention, is relatively implicit and inflexible.
Topics: Attention; Attentional Bias; Goals; Habits; Humans; Reaction Time
PubMed: 35713814
DOI: 10.1186/s41235-022-00404-7