Alerting effects require the absence of surprise.

Ongoing actions are interrupted for a brief period of time whenever salient and expectancy-discrepant stimuli (surprise stimuli) interfere with the present task set. By contrast, salient stimuli (alerting cues) preceding targets can facilitate behaviour by reducing time to initiate actions. Both phenomena seem to be at odds with each other as actions are either impaired or facilitated. Therefore, in the present study, we asked how surprise and alerting effects interact. In two experiments, participants performed choice reaction tasks without any prior knowledge of the impending alerting cue. After a baseline period of trials without an alerting cue, the alerting cue was presented for the first time. It was found that the initial presentation of the alerting cue significantly slowed down reaction times. However, after just a single trial this impairment went away. This reveals that the beneficial effects of alerting for action presuppose that alerting cues are expected and represented in the top-down task set. As such, the present findings challenge the standard view of phasic alerting as a bottom-up and entirely stimulus-driven phenomenon.

The Role of Attention in Category Representation.

Numerous studies have found that selective attention affects category learning. However, previous research did not distinguish between the contribution of focusing and filtering components of selective attention. This study addresses this issue by examining how components of selective attention affect category representation. Participants first learned a rule-plus-similarity category structure, and then were presented with category priming followed by categorization and recognition tests. Additionally, to evaluate the involvement of focusing and filtering, we fit models with different attentional mechanisms to the data. In Experiment 1, participants received rule-based category training, with specific emphasis on a single deterministic feature (D feature). Experiment 2 added a recognition test to examine participants' memory for features. Both experiments indicated that participants categorized items based solely on the D feature, showed greater memory for the D feature, were primed exclusively by the D feature without interference from probabilistic features (P features), and were better fit by models with focusing and at least one type of filtering mechanism. The results indicated that selective attention distorted category representation by highlighting the D feature and attenuating P features. To examine whether the distorted representation was specific to rule-based training, Experiment 3 introduced training, emphasizing all features. Under such training, participants were no longer primed by the D feature, they remembered all features well, and they were better fit by the model assuming only focusing but no filtering process. The results coupled with modeling provide novel evidence that while both focusing and filtering contribute to category representation, filtering can also result in representational distortion.

Individuals vary in their overt attention preference for positive images consistently across time and stimulus types.

What humans look at strongly determines what they see. We show that individual differences in the tendency to look at positive stimuli are stable across time and across contents, establishing gaze positivity preference as a perceptual trait that determines the amount of positively valence stimuli individuals select for visual processing. Furthermore, we show that patients with major depressive disorder exhibit consistently low positivity preference before treatment. In a subset of patients, we also assessed the positivity preference after two months of treatment in which positivity gaze preference increased to levels similar to healthy individuals. We discuss the possible practical diagnostic applications of these findings, as well as how this general gaze-related trait may influence other behavioral and psychological aspects.

An updated review on animal models to study attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neuropsychiatric disorder affecting both children and adolescents. Individuals with ADHD experience heterogeneous problems, such as difficulty in attention, behavioral hyperactivity, and impulsivity. Recent studies have shown that complex genetic factors play a role in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorders. Animal models with clear hereditary traits are crucial for studying the molecular, biological, and brain circuit mechanisms underlying ADHD. Owing to their well-managed genetic origins and the relative simplicity with which the function of neuronal circuits is clearly established, models of mice can help learn the mechanisms involved in ADHD. Therefore, in this review, we highlighting the important genetic animal models that can be used to study ADHD.

Cortico-striatal differences in the epigenome in attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder.

While epigenetic modifications have been implicated in ADHD through studies of peripheral tissue, to date there has been no examination of the epigenome of the brain in the disorder. To address this gap, we mapped the methylome of the caudate nucleus and anterior cingulate cortex in post-mortem tissue from fifty-eight individuals with or without ADHD. While no single probe showed adjusted significance in differential methylation, several differentially methylated regions emerged. These regions implicated genes involved in developmental processes including neurogenesis and the differentiation of oligodendrocytes and glial cells. We demonstrate a significant association between differentially methylated genes in the caudate and genes implicated by GWAS not only in ADHD but also in autistic spectrum, obsessive compulsive and bipolar affective disorders through GWAS. Using transcriptomic data available on the same subjects, we found modest correlations between the methylation and expression of genes. In conclusion, this study of the cortico-striatal methylome points to gene and gene pathways involved in neurodevelopment, consistent with studies of common and rare genetic variation, as well as the post-mortem transcriptome in ADHD.

EEG complexity measures for detecting mind wandering during video-based learning.

This study explores the efficacy of various EEG complexity measures in detecting mind wandering during video-based learning. Employing a modified probe-caught method, we recorded EEG data from participants engaged in viewing educational videos and subsequently focused on the discrimination between mind wandering (MW) and non-MW states. We systematically investigated various EEG complexity metrics, including metrics that reflect a system's regularity like multiscale permutation entropy (MPE), and metrics that reflect a system's dimensionality like detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA). We also compare these features to traditional band power (BP) features. Data augmentation methods and feature selection were applied to optimize detection accuracy. Results show BP features excelled (mean area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) 0.646) in datasets without eye-movement artifacts, while MPE showed similar performance (mean AUC 0.639) without requiring removal of eye-movement artifacts. Combining all kinds of features improved decoding performance to 0.66 mean AUC. Our findings demonstrate the potential of these complexity metrics in EEG analysis for mind wandering detection, highlighting their practical implications in educational contexts.

Rhythmicity of neuronal oscillations delineates their cortical and spectral architecture.

Neuronal oscillations are commonly analyzed with power spectral methods that quantify signal amplitude, but not rhythmicity or 'oscillatoriness' per se. Here we introduce a new approach, the phase-autocorrelation function (pACF), for the direct quantification of rhythmicity. We applied pACF to human intracerebral stereoelectroencephalography (SEEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) data and uncovered a spectrally and anatomically fine-grained cortical architecture in the rhythmicity of single- and multi-frequency neuronal oscillations. Evidencing the functional significance of rhythmicity, we found it to be a prerequisite for long-range synchronization in resting-state networks and to be dynamically modulated during event-related processing. We also extended the pACF approach to measure 'burstiness' of oscillatory processes and characterized regions with stable and bursty oscillations. These findings show that rhythmicity is double-dissociable from amplitude and constitutes a functionally relevant and dynamic characteristic of neuronal oscillations.

Electrodermal and central measures of the tonic orienting reflex (OR).

Sokolov described both phasic and tonic aspects of the Orienting Reflex (OR), but subsequent research and theory development has focussed primarily on the phasic OR at the expense of the tonic OR. The present study used prestimulus skin conductance level (SCL) during a dishabituation paradigm to model the tonic OR, examining its amplitude patterning over repeated standard stimulus presentations and a change stimulus. We expected sensitisation (increased amplitude) following the initial and change trials, and habituation (decrement) over the intervening trials. Prestimulus EEG alpha level was explored as a potential central measure of the tonic OR (as an inverse correlate), examining its pattern over stimulus repetition and change in relation to the SCL model. We presented a habituation series of innocuous auditory stimuli to two groups (each N = 20) at different ISIs (Long 13-15 s and Short 5-7 s) and recorded electrodermal and EEG data during two counterbalanced conditions; Indifferent: no task requirements; Significant: silent counting. Across groups and conditions, prestimulus SCLs and alpha amplitudes generally showed the expected trials patterns, confirming our main hypotheses. Findings have important implications for including the assessment of Sokolov's tonic OR in modelling central and autonomic nervous system interactions of fundamental attention and learning processes.

The time course of feature-selective attention inside and outside the focus of spatial attention.

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.

Estimation of electrical muscle activity during gait using inertial measurement units with convolution attention neural network and small-scale dataset.

In general, muscle activity can be directly measured using Electromyography (EMG) or calculated with musculoskeletal models. However, both methods are not suitable for non-technical users and unstructured environments. It is desired to establish more portable and easy-to-use muscle activity estimation methods. Deep learning (DL) models combined with inertial measurement units (IMUs) have shown great potential to estimate muscle activity. However, it frequently occurs in clinical scenarios that a very small amount of data is available and leads to limited performance of the DL models, while the augmentation techniques to efficiently expand a small sample size for DL model training are rarely used. The primary aim of the present study was to develop a novel DL model to estimate the EMG envelope during gait using IMUs with high accuracy. A secondary aim was to develop a novel model-based data augmentation method to improve the performance of the estimation model with small-scale dataset. Therefore, in the present study, a time convolutional network-based generative adversarial network, namely MuscleGAN, was proposed for data augmentation. Moreover, a subject-independent regression DL model was developed to estimate EMG envelope. Results suggested that the proposed two-stage method has better generalization and estimation performance than the commonly used existing methods. Pearson correlation coefficient and normalized root-mean-square errors derived from the proposed method reached up to 0.72 and 0.13, respectively. It was indicated that the MuscleGAN indeed improved the estimation accuracy of lower limb EMG envelope from 70% to 72%. Thus, even using only two IMUs and a very small-scale dataset, the proposed model is still capable of accurately estimating lower limb EMG envelope, demonstrating considerable potential for its application in clinical and daily life scenarios.

A GRU-CNN model for auditory attention detection using microstate and recurrence quantification analysis.

Attention as a cognition ability plays a crucial role in perception which helps humans to concentrate on specific objects of the environment while discarding others. In this paper, auditory attention detection (AAD) is investigated using different dynamic features extracted from multichannel electroencephalography (EEG) signals when listeners attend to a target speaker in the presence of a competing talker. To this aim, microstate and recurrence quantification analysis are utilized to extract different types of features that reflect changes in the brain state during cognitive tasks. Then, an optimized feature set is determined by employing the processes of significant feature selection based on classification performance. The classifier model is developed by hybrid sequential learning that employs Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) into a unified framework for accurate attention detection. The proposed AAD method shows that the selected feature set achieves the most discriminative features for the classification process. Also, it yields the best performance as compared with state-of-the-art AAD approaches from the literature in terms of various measures. The current study is the first to validate the use of microstate and recurrence quantification parameters to differentiate auditory attention using reinforcement learning without access to stimuli.

High visual salience of alert signals can lead to a counterintuitive increase of reaction times.

It is often assumed that rendering an alert signal more salient yields faster responses to this alert. Yet, there might be a trade-off between attracting attention and distracting from task execution. Here we tested this in four behavioral experiments with eye-tracking using an abstract alert-signal paradigm. Participants performed a visual discrimination task (primary task) while occasional alert signals occurred in the visual periphery accompanied by a congruently lateralized tone. Participants had to respond to the alert before proceeding with the primary task. When visual salience (contrast) or auditory salience (tone intensity) of the alert were increased, participants directed their gaze to the alert more quickly. This confirms that more salient alerts attract attention more efficiently. Increasing auditory salience yielded quicker responses for the alert and primary tasks, apparently confirming faster responses altogether. However, increasing visual salience did not yield similar benefits: instead, it increased the time between fixating the alert and responding, as high-salience alerts interfered with alert-task execution. Such task interference by high-salience alert-signals counteracts their more efficient attentional guidance. The design of alert signals must be adapted to a "sweet spot" that optimizes this stimulus-dependent trade-off between maximally rapid attentional orienting and minimal task interference.

The mediating effect of attentional impulsivity between mindfulness and problematic smartphone use.

OBJECTIVE: Problematic smartphone use has been linked to lower levels of mindfulness, impaired attentional function, and higher impulsivity. This study aimed to identify the psychological mechanisms of problematic smartphone use by exploring the relationship between addictive smartphone use, mindfulness, attentional function and impulsivity. METHODS: Ninety participants were evaluated with the smartphone addiction proneness scale and classified into the problematic smartphone use group (n = 42; 24 women; mean age: 27.6 ± 7.2 years) or normal use group (n = 48; 22 women; mean age: 30.1 ± 5.7 years). All participants completed self-report questionnaires evaluating their trait impulsivity and mindfulness and attention tests that assessed selective, sustained and divided attention. We compared the variables between the groups and explored the relationship between mindfulness, attentional function, impulsivity and addictive smartphone use through mediation analysis. RESULTS: The problematic smartphone use group showed higher trait impulsivity and lower mindfulness than the normal use group. There were no significant group differences in performance on attention tests. Levels of addictive smartphone use were significantly correlated with higher levels of trait impulsivity and lower levels of mindfulness, but not with performance on attention tests. Mediation analysis showed that acting with awareness, an aspect of mindfulness, reduces the degree of addictive smartphone use through attentional impulsivity, one of the trait impulsivity. CONCLUSION: Acting without sufficient awareness could influence addictive smartphone use by mediating attentional impulsivity. This supports that executive control deficits, reflected in high attentional impulsivity, contribute to problematic smartphone use. Our findings imply that mindfulness-based interventions can enhance executive control over smartphone use by promoting awareness.

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).

Does culture moderate the encoding and recognition of negative cues? Evidence from an eye-tracking study.

Cross-cultural research has elucidated many important differences between people from Western European and East Asian cultural backgrounds regarding how each group encodes and consolidates the contents of complex visual stimuli. While Western European groups typically demonstrate a perceptual bias towards centralised information, East Asian groups favour a perceptual bias towards background information. However, this research has largely focused on the perception of neutral cues and thus questions remain regarding cultural group differences in both the perception and recognition of negative, emotionally significant cues. The present study therefore compared Western European (n = 42) and East Asian (n = 40) participants on a free-viewing task and a subsequent memory task utilising negative and neutral social cues. Attentional deployment to the centralised versus background components of negative and neutral social cues was indexed via eye-tracking, and memory was assessed with a cued-recognition task two days later. While both groups demonstrated an attentional bias towards the centralised components of the neutral cues, only the Western European group demonstrated this bias in the case of the negative cues. There were no significant differences observed between Western European and East Asian groups in terms of memory accuracy, although the Western European group was unexpectedly less sensitive to the centralised components of the negative cues. These findings suggest that culture modulates low-level attentional deployment to negative information, however not higher-level recognition after a temporal interval. This paper is, to our knowledge, the first to concurrently consider the effect of culture on both attentional outcomes and memory for both negative and neutral cues.

Changes in concentration performance and alternating attention after short-term virtual reality training in E-athletes: a pilot study.

In the dynamic landscape of e-sports, where intense competitive gaming demands high cognitive abilities, concentration performance and alternating attention play a pivotal role. E-sports encompass diverse genres, each requiring specific cognitive functions. Maintaining unwavering focus is crucial, as split-second decisions can determine victory. The study explores the potential of Virtual Reality (VR) training to enhance concentration performance and alternating attention, shedding light on the importance and possibilities of optimizing cognitive abilities for e-athletes. VR training emerges as a promising intervention, offering immersive environments for cognitive exercises. The study investigates the impact of VR training on concentration performance and alternating attention in amateur e-athletes, utilizing standardized tests. A randomized controlled trial with 66 participants reveals significant improvements in the VR training group, highlighting the adaptability and plasticity of cognitive processes. The findings suggest that VR training can enhance concentration abilities, providing valuable insights for e-sports and potentially extending to other fields requiring sustained attention and rapid task-switching. The study underscores the convergence of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and VR technology, paving the way for innovative training methodologies and advancements in e-sports performance.

Motivation and emotional distraction interact and affect executive functions.

Previous research on cool-hot executive function (EF) interactions has examined the effects of motivation and emotional distraction on cool EF separately, focusing on one EF component at a time. Although both incentives and emotional distractors have been shown to modulate attention, how they interact and affect cool EF processes is still unclear. Here, we used an experimental paradigm that manipulated updating, inhibition, and shifting demands to determine the interactions of motivation and emotional distraction in the context of cool EF. Forty-five young adults (16 males, 29 females) completed the go/no-go (inhibition), two-back (updating), and task-switching (shifting) tasks. Monetary incentives were implemented to manipulate motivation, and task-irrelevant threatening or neutral faces were presented before the target stimulus to manipulate emotional distraction. We found that incentives significantly improved no-go accuracy, two-back accuracy, and reaction time (RT) switch cost. While emotional distractors had no significant effects on overall task performance, they abolished the incentive effects on no-go accuracy and RT switch cost. Altogether, these findings suggest that motivation and emotional distraction interact in the context of cool EF. Specifically, transient emotional distraction disrupts the upregulation of control activated by incentives. The present investigation has advanced knowledge about the relationship between cool and hot EF and highlights the importance of considering motivation-emotion interactions for a fuller understanding of control.

Does movement preparation enhance attending to bodily sensations in the back in people with persistent low back pain?

Attention has been proposed to play an important role in persisting pain, with excessive attentional processes towards pain information leading to worse pain outcomes and maladaptive behaviors. Nevertheless, research on somatosensory attending during the anticipation of pain-related movements is still scarce. This study investigated if individuals with chronic and recurrent lower back pain compared to pain-free controls, show enhanced attending to somatosensory information in the back while anticipating back-recruiting movements. 43 healthy control, 33 recurrent (RLBP) and 33 chronic low back (CLBP) pain sufferers were asked to perform back-recruiting movements. Before the movement initiation cue, a task-irrelevant tactile stimulus was administered to participants' lower back to elicit somatosensory evoked potentials (SEPs), used as an index of somatosensory attending. In contrast to our hypothesis, most identified SEP components did not differ across groups. The only exception was the P175 amplitude which was larger for the CLBP group compared to individuals with RLBP and healthy controls. The current study did not find robust evidence of enhanced somatosensory attending to the back in people with persisting lower back pain. The finding that CLBP, but not RLBP individuals, had larger amplitudes to the P175 component, is discussed as possibly reflecting a higher state of emotional arousal in these patients when having to prepare the back-recruiting movements.

Exploring the impact of autumn color and bare tree landscapes in virtual environments on human well-being and therapeutic effects across different sensory modalities.

In recent years, there has been a growing awareness of the potential health benefits of the natural environment for human well-being. Given the fast-paced nature of contemporary lifestyles, research into the use of virtual environments as a means to provide various seasonal landscapes has gained increasing importance. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of different sensory modes on the preferences and therapeutic effects of virtual autumn landscapes on university campuses. METHODS: In this study, 320 participants, with an average age of 21.11 years (±1.21 years), were exposed to virtual environments featuring autumn color landscapes and bare tree landscapes using visual, auditory, and combined conditions. A control group was included for comparison. Differences in participants' physiological indicators (EEG, heart rate) and psychological measures (POMS, PANAS, SVS, ROS) were analyzed, with the use of the Holm correction (P < 0.05). RESULTS: (1) Autumn virtual landscapes with color had a superior therapeutic effect. (2) There were significant differences in the therapeutic effects of different sensory modes within the same season's landscape categories, suggesting that incorporating additional sensory dimensions may enhance therapeutic outcomes. CONCLUSION: Based on the study's findings, we recommend that when designing therapeutic environments, attention should be given to seasonal variations and the integration of various sensory modes to optimize therapeutic results.