It is a match! Timely response to a specific target boosts concurrent task processing.

Multitasking typically leads to interference. However, responding to attentionally demanding targets in a continuous task paradoxically enhances memory for concurrently presented images, known as the "attentional boost effect" (ABE). Previous research has attributed the ABE to a temporal orienting response induced by the release of norepinephrine from the locus coeruleus when a stimulus is classified as a target. In this study, we tested whether target classification and response decisions act in an all-or-none manner on the ABE, or whether the processes leading up to these decisions also modulate the ABE. Participants encoded objects into memory while monitoring a stream of letters and digits, pressing a key for target letters. To change the process leading to target classification, we asked participants to respond either to a specific target letter or an entire category of letters. To change the process leading to response, we asked participants to either respond immediately to the target or withhold the response until the appearance of the next stimulus. Despite successfully identifying the target and responding to it in all conditions, participants benefited less from target detection in category search than in exact search and less from delayed response than immediate response. These findings suggest that target and response decisions do not act in an all-or-none manner. Instead, the ABE and the temporal orienting response is sensitive to the speed of reaching a perceptual or response decision. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Both target detection and response contribute to the attentional boost effect.

Detecting and responding to targets in an rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream facilitates the processing of concurrently presented images. Theoretical accounts of this attentional boost effect (ABE) have emphasized the role of target detection, yet it is unclear whether the ABE originates from target detection or response. To examine this, we asked participants to search for the letter T among a rapid stream of other letters while encoding objects to memory. The nontarget letters, drawn randomly from the remaining letters of the Roman alphabet, comprised half of the trials. Across three experiments, participants responded only to the target letter T, to all letters but the target letter T, or to both T and not-T with two different keys. The large number of different nontargets ensured that participants preferred to search for the target letter T regardless of the response requirement. We found an ABE when participants responded to the target letter T, but not when they responded to the other nontarget letters, suggesting that response requirement modulated the ABE. Furthermore, making different responses to targets and nontargets led to a memory advantage for target-paired objects. Thus, target detection and response both contributed to the ABE. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Impact of active and latent concerns about COVID-19 on attention.

The interactions between emotion and attention are complex due to the multifaceted nature of attention. Adding to this complexity, the COVID-19 pandemic has altered the emotional landscape, broadly heightening health and financial concerns. Can the heightened concerns about COVID-19 impair one or more of the components of attention? To explore the connection between heightened concerns about COVID-19 and attention, in a preregistered study, we collected survey responses from 234 participants assessing levels of concerns surrounding COVID-19, followed by four psychophysics tasks hypothesized to tap into different aspects of attention: visual search, working memory, sustained attention, and cognitive control. We also measured task-unrelated thoughts. Results showed that task-unrelated thoughts, but not survey reports of concern levels, negatively correlated with sustained attention and cognitive control, while visual search and working memory remained robust to task-unrelated thoughts and survey-indicated concern levels. As a whole, these findings suggest that being concerned about COVID-19 does not interfere with cognitive function unless the concerns are active in the form of task-unrelated thoughts.

Response, rather than target detection, triggers the attentional boost effect in visual search.

Detecting a target in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream is more attentionally demanding than rejecting a distractor. However, background scenes coinciding with RSVP targets are better remembered than those coinciding with RSVP distractors, a paradoxical finding known as the attentional boost effect. But does the effect originate from the detection of the RSVP target or from the need to respond to it? To dissociate target detection from response, we investigated the attentional boost effect using a visual search task. Participants searched for a target among distractors while memorizing concurrently presented background objects. The search target could be present or absent. In different experiments, participants pressed a button on target-present trials only, target-absent trials only, or made a two-choice present/absent response. Results showed that objects paired with a Go response were better remembered than objects paired with a No-Go response, regardless of whether responses were associated with target-present or target-absent trials. This finding was replicated in experiments that required covert counting rather than an immediate button press response. These findings are the first to extend the attentional boost effect to visual search and demonstrate that the need to respond, not the detection of a search target, drives the effect for concurrently presented stimuli. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Sequence learning is surprisingly fragile in visual search.

Extensive research has shown that people are sensitive to statistical regularities of visual stimuli, such as a repeated sequence of object locations. Such learning, however, has primarily occurred for objects presented in isolation. Here, we tested whether sequence learning also manifested in complex displays. Using variants of the serial reaction time task, we asked participants to report the screen quadrant of a letter T, whose location followed a 12-trial sequence that repeated 30 times over 360 trials. In different experiments, we manipulated the nature of distractors surrounding the target. The T could appear in isolation, as a color singleton among distractors with fixed or variable locations, or as a conjunction search target. Sequence learning-expressed as elevated response time when the learned sequence was disrupted-decreased as spatial noise increased. Learning was robust when the T appeared in isolation or when it was surrounded by distractors that did not change locations. It was reduced in feature search and eliminated in conjunction search. These findings suggest that target locations are coded in relation to concurrently presented distractors. Variability in distractor locations disrupts target location sequence learning, revealing a limit to people's ability to extract and use spatiotemporal regularities in complex environments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Do concerns about COVID-19 impair sustained attention?

The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has considerably heightened health and financial concerns for many individuals. Similar concerns, such as those associated with poverty, impair performance on cognitive control tasks. If ongoing concerns about COVID-19 substantially increase the tendency to mind wander in tasks requiring sustained attention, these worries could degrade performance on a wide range of tasks, leading, for example, to increased traffic accidents, diminished educational achievement, and lower workplace productivity. In two pre-registered experiments, we investigated the degree to which young adults' concerns about COVID-19 correlated with their ability to sustain attention. Experiment 1 tested mainly European participants during an early phase of the pandemic. After completing a survey probing COVID-related concerns, participants engaged in a continuous performance task (CPT) over two, 4-min blocks, during which they responded to city scenes that occurred 90% of the time and withheld responses to mountain scenes that occurred 10% of the time. Despite large and stable individual differences, performance on the scene CPT did not significantly correlate with the severity of COVID-related concerns obtained from the survey. Experiment 2 tested US participants during a later phase of the pandemic. Once again, CPT performance did not significantly correlate with COVID concerns expressed in a pre-task survey. However, participants who had more task-unrelated thoughts performed more poorly on the CPT. These findings suggest that although COVID-19 increased anxiety in a broad swath of society, young adults are able to hold these concerns in a latent format, minimizing their impact on performance in a demanding sustained attention task.

Contextual cueing in preview search.

Frequently finding a target in the same location within a familiar context reduces search time, relative to search for objects appearing in novel contexts. This learned association between a context and a target location requires several blocks of training and has long-term effects. Short-term selection history also influences search, where previewing a subset of a search context shortly before the appearance of the target and remaining distractors speeds search. Here we explored the interactions between contextual cueing and preview benefit using a modified version of a paradigm from Hodsoll and Humphreys (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 31(6), 1346-1358, 2005). Participants searched for a T target among L distractors. Half of the distractors appeared 800 ms before the addition of the other distractors and the target. We independently manipulated the repetition of the previewed distractors and the newly added distractors. Though the previewed set never contained the target, repetition of either the previewed or the newly added context yielded contextual cueing, and the effect was greater when the previewed context repeated. Another experiment trained participants to associate the previewed context with a target location, then disrupted the association in a testing phase. This disruption eliminated contextual cueing, suggesting that learning of the previewed context was associative. These findings demonstrate an important interaction between distinct kinds of selection history effects.

Perceptual learning in the identification of lung cancer in chest radiographs.

Extensive research has shown that practice yields highly specific perceptual learning of simple visual properties such as orientation and contrast. Does this same learning characterize more complex perceptual skills? Here we investigated perceptual learning of complex medical images. Novices underwent training over four sessions to discriminate which of two chest radiographs contained a tumor and to indicate the location of the tumor. In training, one group received six repetitions of 30 normal/abnormal images, the other three repetitions of 60 normal/abnormal images. Groups were then tested on trained and novel images. To assess the nature of perceptual learning, test items were presented in three formats - the full image, the cutout of the tumor, or the background only. Performance improved across training sessions, and notably, the improvement transferred to the classification of novel images. Training with more repetitions on fewer images yielded comparable transfer to training with fewer repetitions on more images. Little transfer to novel images occurred when tested with just the cutout of the cancer region or just the background, but a larger cutout that included both the cancer region and some surrounding regions yielded good transfer. Perceptual learning contributes to the acquisition of expertise in cancer image perception.

Effects of changing object identity on location working memory.

It is widely accepted that features and locations are represented independently in an initial stage of visual processing. But to what degree are they represented separately at a later stage, after objects enter visual working memory (VWM)? In one of her last studies on VWM, Treisman raised an open question about how people represent locations in VWM, suggesting that locations may be remembered independently of what occupies them. Using photographs of real-world objects, we tested the independence of location memory from object identity in a location change detection task. We introduced changes to object identities between the encoding and test arrays, but instructed participants to treat the objects as placeholders. Three experiments showed that location memory was disrupted when the placeholders changed shape or orientation. The disruption was more noticeable for elongated than for round placeholders and was comparable between real-world objects and rectangles of similar aspect ratio. These findings suggest that location representation is sensitive to the placeholders' geometric properties. Though they contradict the idea that objects are just placeholders in location working memory (WM), the findings support Treisman's proposal that the items in VWM are bound to the global configuration of the memory array.

Implicit guidance of attention in contextual cueing: Neuropsychological and developmental evidence.

When searching for an object in a familiar environment, we may automatically orient to locations where this object was often placed previously. Contextual cueing refers to the guidance of attention by repeated search context. As an implicit mechanism with high capacity, contextual cueing may be important for people whose cognitive function is compromised, immature, or in decline. Here we review and synthesize the last two decades of research on contextual cueing, focusing on neuropsychological and developmental evidence. Contextual cueing is largely preserved in young children, older adults, and individuals with autism spectrum disorders or mild intellectual impairment. Some, though not all, studies find a deficit in contextual cueing in amnesic patients, patients with basal ganglia damage, children with ADHD, and individuals with psychiatric disorders. Although the medial temporal lobe, the basal ganglia, and the posterior parietal cortex are implicated in contextual cueing, definitive evidence for their necessity is lacking. These findings suggest that contextual cueing is an evolutionarily conserved mechanism that is exceptionally robust to damages to single brain sites.