Assessment of Drivers' Mental Workload by Multimodal Measures during Auditory-Based Dual-Task Driving Scenarios.

Assessing drivers' mental workload is crucial for reducing road accidents. This study examined drivers' mental workload in a simulated auditory-based dual-task driving scenario, with driving tasks as the main task, and auditory-based N-back tasks as the secondary task. A total of three levels of mental workload (i.e., low, medium, high) were manipulated by varying the difficulty levels of the secondary task (i.e., no presence of secondary task, 1-back, 2-back). Multimodal measures, including a set of subjective measures, physiological measures, and behavioral performance measures, were collected during the experiment. The results showed that an increase in task difficulty led to increased subjective ratings of mental workload and a decrease in task performance for the secondary N-back tasks. Significant differences were observed across the different levels of mental workload in multimodal physiological measures, such as delta waves in EEG signals, fixation distance in eye movement signals, time- and frequency-domain measures in ECG signals, and skin conductance in EDA signals. In addition, four driving performance measures related to vehicle velocity and the deviation of pedal input and vehicle position also showed sensitivity to the changes in drivers' mental workload. The findings from this study can contribute to a comprehensive understanding of effective measures for mental workload assessment in driving scenarios and to the development of smart driving systems for the accurate recognition of drivers' mental states.

Naturalistic assessment of reaction time variability in older adults at risk for Alzheimer's disease.

OBJECTIVE: Maintaining attention underlies many aspects of cognition and becomes compromised early in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's disease (AD). The consistency of maintaining attention can be measured with reaction time (RT) variability. Previous work has focused on measuring such fluctuations during in-clinic testing, but recent developments in remote, smartphone-based cognitive assessments can allow one to test if these fluctuations in attention are evident in naturalistic settings and if they are sensitive to traditional clinical and cognitive markers of AD. METHOD: Three hundred and seventy older adults (aged 75.8 +/- 5.8 years) completed a week of remote daily testing on the Ambulatory Research in Cognition (ARC) smartphone platform and also completed clinical, genetic, and conventional in-clinic cognitive assessments. RT variability was assessed in a brief (20-40 seconds) processing speed task using two different measures of variability, the Coefficient of Variation (CoV) and the Root Mean Squared Successive Difference (RMSSD) of RTs on correct trials. RESULTS: Symptomatic participants showed greater variability compared to cognitively normal participants. When restricted to cognitively normal participants, APOE ε4 carriers exhibited greater variability than noncarriers. Both CoV and RMSSD showed significant, and similar, correlations with several in-clinic cognitive composites. Finally, both RT variability measures significantly mediated the relationship between APOE ε4 status and several in-clinic cognition composites. CONCLUSIONS: Attentional fluctuations over 20-40 seconds assessed in daily life, are sensitive to clinical status and genetic risk for AD. RT variability appears to be an important predictor of cognitive deficits during the preclinical disease stage.

A novel multisensory device for the assessment and rehabilitation of perceptual and attentional competencies.

The present study aims to assess a novel technological device suitable for investigating perceptual and attentional competencies in people with or without sensory impairment. The TechPAD is a cabled system including embedded sensors and actuators to enable visual, auditory, and tactile interactions and a capacitive surface receiving inputs from the user. The system is conceived to create multisensory environments, using multiple units controlled separately and simultaneously. We assessed the device by adapting a spatial attention task comparing performances in different cognitive load conditions (high or low) and stimulation (unimodal, bimodal, or trimodal). 28 sighted adults were asked to monitor both the central and peripheral parts of the device and to tap a target stimulus (either visual, auditory, haptic, or multimodal) as fast as they could. Our results suggest that this new device can provide congruent and incongruent multimodal stimuli and quantitatively measure parameters such as reaction time and accuracy, allowing to investigate perceptual mechanisms in multisensory environments.Clinical Relevance-The TechPad is a reliable tool for the assessment of spatial attention during interactive tasks. its application in clinical trials will pave the way to its role in multisensory rehabilitation.

A psychometric study of an executive function assessment instrument (TDI-FE).

BACKGROUND: This study aims to present and discuss the psychometric properties of executive functions, which were measured using the TDI-FE instrument. The analysis encompasses its internal structure, potential sensitivity to fatigue factors, relationships with external criteria, and diagnostic accuracy. METHODS: The study sample comprised 382 students from Brazil, aged 6-8 years. Child development variables were screened using the TDI-FE and gold standard tests (Cancellation Attention and Trail Making Tests). The proposed scale comprised four activities: a test with fruit images with three tasks, and one memory game. RESULTS: The one-factor model of EF of the TDI-FE failed to fit to the data. However, fit substantially improved once a latent fatigue factor was controlled in the model. The latent factor of EF assessed by the TDI-FE tasks was coherently associated with a series of external variables, including two popular collateral measures of EF. The diagnostic accuracy was reasonable, and a cut-off of 37 points produced 70% of sensitivity and 60% of specificity. CONCLUSION: Results indicated that the TDI-FE demonstrated sound psychometric properties and diagnostic accuracy, then consisting of an efficient alternative for the assessment of EFs in early childhood education. The study also proved the need to control for response biases such as fatigue in the latent variable models of EF. The TDI-FE is notable because of its low cost and easy application, and it might fulfill a need for instruments for individuals from different contexts at this stage of development in Brazil.

Detection cost: A nonnegligible factor contributing to inhibition of return in the discrimination task under the cue-target paradigm.

The three-factor model argues that the spatial orienting benefit triggered by the cue, the spatial selection benefit of cue-target matching, and the detection cost of distinguishing the cue from the target contribute to the measured inhibition of return (IOR) effect. According to the three-factor model, the spatial selection benefit dominates the occurrence of the IOR effect in the discrimination task, while the detection cost is negligible. The present study verified the three-factor model in the discrimination task under the cue-target paradigm by manipulating the spatial location and nonspatial feature consistency of the cue and the target as well as the promotion or hindrance of attentional disengagement from the cued location with a central reorienting cue. The results indicated that the three factors of the three-factor model contributed to the measured IOR effect in the discrimination task. Interestingly, the IOR effect was stable when the cue and target were perfectly repeated and attention was maintained at the cued location, implying that detection cost was not a negligible factor. The current study supported the contribution of all three factors in the three-factor model to the measured IOR effect; however, we argue that the role of detection cost in the discrimination task under different paradigms should be further refined.

On the importance of working memory in the driving safety field: A systematic review.

In recent years, many studies have used poor cognitive functions to explain risk safety differences among drivers. Working memory is a cognitive function with information storage and attentional control that plays a crucial role in driver information processing. Furthermore, it is inextricably linked to parameters such as driving performance, driving eye movements and driving neurophysiology, which have a significant impact on drivers' risky behavior and crash risk. In particular, crash risk is a serious risk to social safety and economic development. For this reason, it is necessary to understand how risk-related working memory affects driving so that pre-driving safety pre-training programs and in-vehicle safety assistance systems for driving can be developed accordingly, contributing to the development of semi-autonomous vehicles and even autonomous vehicles. In this paper, a systematic search of the literature over the past 23 years resulted in 78 articles that met the eligibility criteria and quality assessment. The results show that higher working memory capacity, as measured neuropsychologically, is associated with more consistent and safer driving-related parameters for drivers (e.g., lane keeping) and may be related to pupil dilation during risk perception while driving, which is associated with driving outcomes (tickets, pull-overs, penalty points and fines,and driving accidents) is closely related to the perceived usefulness of the human-machine interface, reaction time, standard deviation of steering wheel corners, etc. when the autonomous driving takes over. In addition, higher working memory load interference was associated with more inconsistent and unsafe driving-related parameters (including but not limited to eye movements, electrophysiology, etc.), with higher working memory load being associated with easier driver concentration on the road, faster heart rate, lower heart rate variability, and lower oxyhemoglobin (OxyHb) and deoxyhemoglobin (DeoxyHb). Only a limited number of studies have simultaneously investigated the relationship between working memory capacity, working memory load and driving, showing an interaction between working memory capacity and working memory load on lane change initiation and lane change correctness, with working memory capacity acting as a covariate that mediated the effect of working memory load on braking reaction time. In addition, working memory-related cognitive training had a transfer effect on improving driving ability. Overall, working memory capacity determines the upper limit of the number of working memory attention resources, while working memory load occupies part of the working memory attention resources, thus influencing information perception, decision judgment, operational response, and collision avoidance in driving. Future effective interventions for safe driving can be combined with capacity training and load alerting. These findings contribute to our understanding of the role of working memory in driving and provide new insights into the design of driver safety training programs and automated driving personalized in-vehicle safety systems and roadside devices such as signage.

What is behind partial repetition costs? Event-files do not fully occupy bound feature codes.

Feature binding accounts state that features of perceived and produced events are bound into event-files. Performance while responding to an event is impaired when some, as opposed to all or none, of this event's features already belong to a previous event-file. While these partial repetition costs are generally considered to be indicators of feature binding, their cause is still unclear. Possibly, features are fully occupied when bound in an event-file and must be unbound in a time-consuming process before they can enter a novel event-file. In this study, we tested this code occupation account. Participants responded to the font color (target) of a word (distractor) by pressing one of three keys (response) while ignoring the word meaning. We measured partial repetition costs from prime to probe while introducing an intermediate trial. We compared sequences in which this intermediate trial did not repeat any prime features and sequences in which it repeated either the prime response or distractor. Partial repetition costs occurred in the probe, even when one (vs. none) of the prime features repeated in the intermediate trial, although significantly reduced. Thus, single bindings do not fully occupy feature codes. By ruling out a possible mechanism behind partial repetition costs, the present study contributes to the further specification of feature binding accounts.

Switching between emotions in the twenty-first century attention economy.

The use of naturalistic stimuli in cognitive neuroscience experiments inspires and requires theoretical foundations that bring together different cognitive domains, such as emotion, language, and morality. By zooming in on the digital environments in which we often perceive emotional messages today, and inspired by the Mixed and Ambiguous Emotions and Morality model, we here argue that successfully processing emotional information in the twenty-first century will often have to rely not only on simulation and/or mentalizing, but also on executive control and attention regulation.

Neurophysiological evidence against attentional suppression as the source of the same-location cost in spatial cueing.

Spatial cues that mismatch the colour of a subsequent target have been shown to slow responses to targets that share their location. The source of this 'same location cost' (SLC) is currently unknown. Two potential sources are attentional signal suppression and object-file updating. Here, we tested a direct prediction of the suppression account using data from a spatial-cueing study in which we recorded brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG), and focusing on the event-related PD component, which is thought to index attentional signal suppression. Correlating PD amplitude with SLC magnitude, we tested the prediction that if attentional signal suppression is the source of the SLC, then the SLC should be positively correlated with PD amplitude. Across 48 participants, SLC and PD magnitudes were negatively correlated, in direct contradiction to a suppression account of the SLC. These results are compatible with an object-file updating account of the SLC in which updating is facilitated by reactive suppression of the to-be-updated stimulus information.

Attentional control deficits and suicidal ideation variability: An ecological momentary assessment study in major depression.

Suicidal behavior is associated with deficits in cognitive control; however, suicidal ideation (SI), a key precursor to suicidal behavior, has been less consistently linked to neuropsychological functioning. Additionally, no study to date has examined attentional control capacities in relation to variability in suicidal ideation, defined as fluctuation in SI intensity and duration across short periods of time. Prior research suggests that suicidal individuals with highly variable SI experience greater stress-responsive increases in SI and cortisol, potentially raising risk for suicidal behavior. Here, we examined attentional control capacities associated with SI variability and severity in ninety-five subjects with major depressive disorder. Variability and severity of SI and depressive affect were quantified using Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) over a 7-day period. Participants completed the Continuous Performance Task (CPT) and a computerized Stroop task for assessment of attentional control. EMA SI variability was associated with greater attentional interference on the Stroop task, and this was not accounted for by severity of SI, concurrently assessed depressive affect, or baseline depression. CPT performance was not related to SI variability or intensity. Findings highlight the utility of EMA methods in characterizing patterned experiences of SI and suggest that attentional control deficits may contribute to these characteristic patterns.

Binding time: Investigations on the integration of visual stimulus duration.

The perception of and reaction to objects creates bindings of (object) features and responses, also called event files. In this context, time is a so far understudied feature. We conducted four experiments to investigate whether the duration of visual stimuli is also integrated into such event files. Experiments 1, 2, and 4 used a simple colour classification task and in Experiment 3 the location of a stimulus had to be classified. In all Experiments, the presentation duration of the stimuli (coloured circles) was either short (20 ms) or long (300 ms). We expected partial repetition costs as an indicator of binding. That is, performance should be better when both colour (Experiment 3: location) and duration repeat or alternate relative to partial repetitions. Results showed no partial repetition costs in Experiments 1 and 3, indicating no integration of duration into visual event files. Experiments 2 and 4 revealed partial repetition costs. Performance was better when Colour and Duration repeated compared with a partial repetition. What distinguishes the latter two experiments from the former is that the coloured stimuli could change their presentation location. The results of all four experiments show a pattern that duration can be integrated into visual event files depending on two criteria: The experimental context holds the possibility of a location change of the target stimulus (Experiments 2 and 4) and the location itself is not response relevant (Experiment 3). The role of location changes for the integration of temporal stimulus features into visual event files is discussed.

The cost of attentional reorienting on conscious visual perception: an MEG study.

How do attentional networks influence conscious perception? To answer this question, we used magnetoencephalography in human participants and assessed the effects of spatially nonpredictive or predictive supra-threshold peripheral cues on the conscious perception of near-threshold Gabors. Three main results emerged. (i) As compared with invalid cues, both nonpredictive and predictive valid cues increased conscious detection. Yet, only predictive cues shifted the response criterion toward a more liberal decision (i.e. willingness to report the presence of a target under conditions of greater perceptual uncertainty) and affected target contrast leading to 50% detections. (ii) Conscious perception following valid predictive cues was associated to enhanced activity in frontoparietal networks. These responses were lateralized to the left hemisphere during attentional orienting and to the right hemisphere during target processing. The involvement of frontoparietal networks occurred earlier in valid than in invalid trials, a possible neural marker of the cost of re-orienting attention. (iii) When detected targets were preceded by invalid predictive cues, and thus reorienting to the target was required, neural responses occurred in left hemisphere temporo-occipital regions during attentional orienting, and in right hemisphere anterior insular and temporo-occipital regions during target processing. These results confirm and specify the role of frontoparietal networks in modulating conscious processing and detail how invalid orienting of spatial attention disrupts conscious processing.

The hidden cost of a smartphone: The effects of smartphone notifications on cognitive control from a behavioral and electrophysiological perspective.

Since their release in 2007, smartphones and their use have seemingly become a fundamental aspect of life in western society. Prior literature has suggested a link between mobile technology use and lower levels of cognitive control when people engage in a cognitively demanding task. This effect is more evident for people who report higher levels of smartphone use. The current study examined the effects of smartphones notifications on cognitive control and attention. Participants completed the Navon Letter paradigm which paired visual (frequent and rare target letters) and auditory (smartphone and control sounds) stimuli. We found that overall, participants responded slower on trials paired with smartphone notification (vs. control) sounds. They also demonstrated larger overall N2 ERP and a larger N2 oddball effect on trials paired with smartphone (vs. control) sounds, suggesting that people generally exhibited greater levels of cognitive control on the smartphone trials. In addition, people with higher smartphone addiction proneness showed lower P2 ERP on trials with the smartphone (vs. control) sounds, suggesting lower attentional engagement. These results add to the debate on the effects of smartphones on cognition. Limitations and future directions are discussed.

Costs and benefits of audiovisual interactions.

A strong temporal correlation promotes integration of concurrent sensory signals, either within a single sensory modality, or from different modalities. Although the benefits of such integration are well known, far less attention has been given to possible costs incurred when concurrent sensory signals are uncorrelated. In two experiments, subjects categorized the rate at which a visual object modulated in size, while they also tried to ignore a concurrent task-irrelevant broadband sound. Overall, the experiments showed that (i) losses in accuracy from mismatched auditory and visual rates were larger than gains from matched rates and (ii) mismatched auditory and visual rates slowed responses more than they were sped up when rates matched. Experiment One showed that audiovisual interaction varied with the difference between the visual modulation rate and the modulation rate of a concurrent auditory stimulus. Experiment Two showed that audiovisual interaction depended upon the strength of the task-irrelevant auditory modulation. Although our stimuli involved abstract, low-dimensional stimuli, not speech, the effects we observed parallel key findings on interference in multi-speaker settings.

Preferred music listening is associated with perceptual learning enhancement at the expense of self-focused attention.

Can preferred music listening improve following attentional and learning performances? Here we suggest that this may be the case. In Experiment 1, following preferred and non-preferred musical-piece listening, we recorded electrophysiological responses to an auditory roving-paradigm. We computed the mismatch negativity (MMN - the difference between responses to novel and repeated stimulation), as an index of perceptual learning, and we measured the correlation between trial-by-trial EEG responses and the fluctuations in Bayesian Surprise, as a quantification of the neural attunement with stimulus informational value. Furthermore, during music listening, we recorded oscillatory cortical activity. MMN and trial-by-trial correlation with Bayesian surprise were significantly larger after subjectively preferred versus non-preferred music, indicating the enhancement of perceptual learning. The analysis on oscillatory activity during music listening showed a selective alpha power increased in response to preferred music, an effect often related to cognitive enhancements. In Experiment 2, we explored whether this learning improvement was realized at the expense of self-focused attention. Therefore, after preferred versus non-preferred music listening, we collected Heart-Beat Detection (HBD) accuracy, as a measure of the attentional focus toward the self. HBD was significantly lowered following preferred music listening. Overall, our results suggest the presence of a specific neural mechanism that, in response to aesthetically pleasing stimuli, and through the modulation of alpha oscillatory activity, redirects neural resources away from the self and toward the environment. This attentional up-weighting of external stimuli might be fruitfully exploited in a wide area of human learning activities, including education, neurorehabilitation and therapy.

Event rate effects on children with attention-deficit/hyperactive disorder: Test predictions from the moderate brain arousal model and the neuro-energetics theory using the diffusion decision model.

BACKGROUND: Converging evidence has found that the inhibitory control of children with attention-deficit/hyperactive disorder (ADHD) is context-dependent and particularly susceptible to the event rate. The Moderate Brain Arousal (MBA) model predicts a U-shaped curve between event rate and performance as a modulation of brain arousal. The neuroenergetics theory (NeT) proposes that a smaller event rate results in neuronal fatigue and subsequent descent performance. However, previous work applied the traditional one-dimensional index of performance, such as accuracy rate and response time, which might limit the exploration of the event rate effect on the specific underlying process. AIMS: We used a diffusion decision model (DDM) to study the influence of event rate on inhibition control in children with ADHD and verified the explanation of the MBA model and the NeT. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: The Stop Signal Task manipulated by four event rate conditions was conducted with 24 children with ADHD (mean age=8.5, males=16) and 29 typical developmental children (TDC) (mean age=9.0, males=12). DDM was applied to compare the differences in the DDM parameters across different event rates. OUTCOMES AND RESULTS: Compared with TDC, children with ADHD had a smaller drift rate, longer non-decision time, and smaller boundary separation. Although the event rate had little influence on ADHD, the drift rate of the TDC was approximately linear with an increased event rate, and the Ter had a quadratic function relationship with the event rate. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: The event rate effect may influence children's performance through dual mechanisms. Neuronal energy supply could regulate information processing and brain arousal to regulate the activation of primary stimuli encoding and motor control. Insight into the multi-mechanism of ADHD cognition deficits would be helpful for clinicians in making objective diagnoses and effective targeted treatments.

Trial-to-trial modulation of task-order switch costs survive long inter-trial intervals.

BACKGROUND: Dual-tasking procedures often involve the successive presentation of two different stimuli, requiring participants to execute two tasks in a particular order. Performance in both tasks suffers if the order of the tasks is reversed (i.e., switched) compared to the directly preceding trial. This task-order switch cost is reduced, however, if the preceding trial itself involved a task-order switch compared to a task-order repetition (Strobach in Acta Psychol 217:103328, 2021). Theoretical accounts range from assumptions of top-down implementation of a task-order control set, or passive persistence thereof, to priming based on episodic binding of tasks and temporal positions. Here, we tested these accounts by investigating whether the sequential modulation decays as a function of the inter-trial interval. METHODS AND RESULTS: Task-order switch costs were reliably reduced after a task-order switch (compared to after a task-order repetition) and this reduction did not decrease over inter-trial intervals ranging from 350 ms to 1,400 ms. Also replicating previous findings, for reaction times the reduction was driven by selective slowing in task-order repeat trials, suggesting increased response caution. CONCLUSIONS: Our results are consistent with preparatory processes of task-order control or with episodic integration of task-order information but argue against accounts assuming short-lived, decaying task-order sets.

No sound is more distracting than the one you're trying not to hear: delayed costs of mental control of task-irrelevant neutral and emotional sounds.

BACKGROUND: Suppressing intrusive thoughts can result in a post-suppression rebound effect where the same thoughts become hyperaccessible. The current study aimed to investigate if similar so-called rebound effects could be observed when people attempted to mentally suppress awareness of nonsensical auditory stimuli. Based on previous research on thought suppression and mental control in other domains, we hypothesized that attempting to suppress awareness of a task-irrelevant sound while under cognitive load would impact evaluations of the sound on affective dimensions and loudness, and result in increased general vigilance, as evidenced by faster responding on subsequent tasks. METHODS: We performed two experiments where participants in a suppression condition were initially instructed to mentally suppress awareness of a sound while performing a mentally challenging task. Participants in a control condition performed the same task without receiving any instructions regarding the sound. In Experiment 1, the sound was affectively neutral, while in Experiment 2 participants were presented with an inherently aversive (tinnitus-like) sound. After this initial phase, participants performed tasks measuring vigilance and attention, and were also asked to give subjective ratings of the sounds on a number of affective dimensions and loudness. RESULTS: In Experiment 1, participants in the suppression condition showed faster response times on both a visual search task and an auditory spatial cueing task, as compared to participants in the control condition. Contrary to our predictions, participants in the suppression condition did not rate the distractor sound as louder than participants in the control condition, and there were no differences on affective dimensions. In Experiment 2, results revealed that participants in the suppression condition made more errors on a visual search task, specifically on trials where the previously suppressed sound was presented. In contrast to results from Experiment 1, participants in the suppression condition also rated the targeted sound as louder. CONCLUSIONS: The findings provide preliminary support for a post-suppression rebound effect in the auditory domain and further suggest that this effect may be moderated by the emotional properties of the auditory stimulus.

The persistence of distraction: The hidden costs of intermittent multitasking.

We examined the hidden costs of intermittent multitasking. Participants performed a pursuit-tracking task (Experiment 1) or drove in a high-fidelity driving simulator (Experiment 2) by itself or while concurrently performing an easy or difficult backwards counting task that periodically started and stopped, creating on-task and off-task multitasking epochs. A novel application of the Detection Response Task (DRT), a standardized protocol for measuring cognitive workload (ISO 17488, 2016), was used to measure performance in the on-task and off-task intervals. We found striking costs that persisted well after the counting task had stopped. In fact, the multitasking costs dissipated as a negatively accelerated function of time with the largest costs observed immediately after multitasking ceased. Performance in the off-task interval remained above baseline levels throughout the 30-s off-task interval. We suggest that loading new procedures into working memory occurs fairly quickly, whereas purging this information from working memory takes considerably longer. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The working memory costs of a central attentional bottleneck in multitasking.

When two (or more) tasks, each requiring a rapid response, are performed at the same time then serial processing may occur at certain processing stages, such as the response selection. There is accumulating evidence that such serial processing involves additional control processes, such as inhibition, switching, and scheduling (termed the active scheduling account). The present study tested whether the existence of serial processing in multitasking leads to a requirement for processes that coordinate processing in this way (active scheduling account) and, furthermore, whether such control processes are linked to the executive functions (EF) of working memory (WM). To test this question, we merged the psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm with a WM task, creating a complex WM span task. Participants were presented with a sequence of letters to remember, followed by a processing block in which they had to perform either a single task or a dual task, and finally were asked to recall the letters. Results showed that WM performance, i.e. the amount of letters recalled in the correct order, decreased when performing a dual task as compared to performing a single task during the retention interval. Two further experiments supported this finding using manipulations of the dual task difficulty. We conclude that the existence of serial processing in multitasking demands additional control processes (active scheduling) and that these processes are strongly linked to the executive functions of working memory.