Action video games and posterior parietal cortex neuromodulation enhance both attention and reading in adults with developmental dyslexia.

The impact of action video games on reading performance has been already demonstrated in individuals with and without neurodevelopmental disorders. The combination of action video games and posterior parietal cortex neuromodulation by a transcranial random noise stimulation could enhance brain plasticity, improving attentional control and reading skills also in adults with developmental dyslexia. In a double blind randomized controlled trial, 20 young adult nonaction video game players with developmental dyslexia were trained for 15 h with action video games. Half of the participants were stimulated with bilateral transcranial random noise stimulation on the posterior parietal cortex during the action video game training, whereas the others were in the placebo (i.e. sham) condition. Word text reading, pseudowords decoding, and temporal attention (attentional blink), as well as electroencephalographic activity during the attentional blink, were measured before and after the training. The action video game + transcranial random noise stimulation group showed temporal attention, word text reading, and pseudoword decoding enhancements and P300 amplitude brain potential changes. The enhancement in temporal attention performance was related with the efficiency in pseudoword decoding improvement. Our results demonstrate that the combination of action video game training with parietal neuromodulation increases the efficiency of visual attention deployment, probably reshaping goal-directed and stimulus-driven fronto-parietal attentional networks interplay in young adults with neurodevelopmental conditions.

Total sleep deprivation effects on the attentional blink.

The Attentional Blink (AB) is a phenomenon that reflects difficulty in detecting or identifying the second of two successive targets (T1 and T2) that are presented in rapid succession, between 200-500ms apart. The AB involves indicators of attentional and temporal integration mechanisms related to the early stages of visual processing. The aim of this study was to identify the effects of 24-h of sleep deprivation (total sleep deprivation, TSD) on the attentional and temporal integration mechanisms of the AB. Twenty-two undergraduate students were recorded during five successive days, in these three conditions: baseline (two days), TSD (one day), and recovery (two days). Each day, at around 12:00 h, participants responded to a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation task (RSVP) that presented two targets separated by random intervals from 100 to 1000ms. The attentional mechanisms were assessed by the AB presence, the AB magnitude, and the AB interval, while the temporal integration mechanisms were evaluated by lag-1 sparing and order reversal responses. TSD negatively affected the attentional mechanisms, which is expressed by an overall reduction in performance, an extended AB interval, and a reduced AB magnitude. TSD also negatively affected the temporal integration mechanisms, manifested by an absence of lag-1 sparing and an increase in order reversals. These results suggest that people are still able to respond to two successive stimuli after 24 h without sleep. However, it becomes more difficult to respond to both stimuli because the attentional and temporal integration mechanisms of the AB are impaired.

Attentional blink in infants under 7 months.

Attentional blink manifests in infants at 7 months of age, indicating that the working memory capacity of 7-month-olds is comparable to that of adults. However, attentional blink in infants under 7 months is not well understood. In this study, we conducted two experiments to investigate attentional blink in 5- and 6-month-old infants. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrated that attentional blinks were not observed with either a short lag (200 ms) or a long lag (800 ms). This suggests that 5- and 6-month-olds are unable to consolidate both targets regardless of the temporal distance between the two. We then split the infants into two groups by their age and conducted Experiment 2 with infants aged younger and older than 180 days to compare their consolidating ability to observe whether they could recognize a single item at 100-ms speed by presenting the same visual stream that was used in Experiment 1 except that one target was eliminated. The results showed that infants over 180 days of age could identify a single target in the visual stream at 100-ms presentation speed, whereas infants under 180 days could not. The findings of the current study indicate that the limitation of working memory capacity in infants under 7 months of age is a possible reason for the lack of attentional blink.

Temporal integration of target features across and within trials in the attentional blink.

Attentional blink research has typically investigated attentional limitations in multiple target processing. The current study investigated the temporal integration of target features in the attentional blink. Across two experiments, we demonstrated that the orientation estimations of individual target items in the attentional blink paradigm were systematically biased. Specifically, there was evidence for both within- and across-trial biases, revealing a general bias towards previously presented stimuli. Moreover, both biases were found to be more salient for targets suffering from the attentional blink. The current study is the first to demonstrate an across-trial bias in responses in the attentional blink paradigm. This set of findings is in line with the literature, suggesting that the human visual system can implicitly summarize information presented over time, which may lead to biases. By investigating temporal integration in the attentional blink, we have been able to address the modulatory role of attention on biases imposed by the implicit temporal effects in estimation tasks. Our findings may inform future research on attentional blink, serial dependence, and ensemble perception.

Proactive control: Endogenous cueing effects in a two-target attentional blink task.

This study examined proactive control in a two-target task using an endogenous cueing method. Participants identified two target words (T1 then T2) presented in rapid succession. T1 was presented alone or interleaved with a distractor word. In Experiment 1, informative pre-cues that signalled T1 selection difficulty were randomly intermixed with uninformative pre-cues. The results revealed a cueing effect for both T1 and T2, with better performance for informative cues than for uninformative cues. In Experiment 2, informative and uninformative cues were mixed for one group, and blocked for another group. In the mixed cue group, we again found a T2 cueing effect. In the blocked cue group, a cueing effect was observed for both T1 and T2, with the T2 cueing effect restricted to the shortest T1-T2 SOA. The results demonstrate that pre-cues of attentional conflictcan modulate performance in a two-target task used to measure the attentional blink.

Crisis-related stimuli do not increase the emotional attentional blink in a general university student population.

Crises such as natural disasters or pandemics negatively impact the mental health of the affected community, increasing rates of depression, anxiety, or stress. It has been proposed that this stems in part from crisis-related stimuli triggering negative reactions that interrupt daily life. Given the frequency and prominence of crisis events, it is crucial to understand when crisis-related stimuli involuntarily capture attention and trigger increased stress and distraction from obligations. The emotional attentional blink (EAB) paradigm-in which emotional distractors hinder report of subsequent targets in streams of rapidly displayed stimuli-allows examination of such attentional capture in a rapidly changing dynamic environment. EABs are typically observed with generally disturbing stimuli, but stimuli related to personal traumas yield similar or greater effects, indicating strong attentional capture by stimuli related to individual trauma history. The current study investigated whether a similar comparable or increased crisis-related EAB exists within a community affected by large-scale crisis. Specifically, effects of conventional emotional distractors and distractors related to recent crises were compared using EABs in university students without a mental health diagnosis. Experiment 1 used images related to Hurricane Harvey, evaluating a crisis 4 years prior to data collection. Experiment 2 used words related to the COVID pandemic, evaluating an ongoing crisis at the time of data collection. In both experiments, the conventional EAB distractors yielded strong EABs, while the crisis-related distractors yielded absent or weak EABs in the same participants. This suggests that crisis-related stimuli do not have special potency for capturing attention in the general university student population. More generally, crises affecting communities do not necessarily yield widespread, strong reactivity to crisis-related stimuli.

Impact of inhibition level on field-dependent and field-independent individuals in attentional blink.

The attentional blink (AB) phenomenon is a cognitive limitation that refers to the failure in identifying the second target if it follows the first one in close temporal proximity (200-500 ms). However, more recent studies have demonstrated that AB task performance greatly differs among individuals. This behavioral heterogeneity in AB has promoted research on exploring the predictive value of individual differences. The present study examined how AB magnitudes were related to personal cognitive styles. The Embedded Figures Test was carried out to classify participants' cognitive styles, along with the manipulation of the physical characteristics of distractors in the rapid serial visual presentation paradigm (RSVP) as two levels of inhibition (target-distractor similarity). Results from two experiments of varying difficulty revealed that the AB effect varied between field-dependent (FD) and field-independent (FI) individuals. The AB magnitude in FD individuals was more easily influenced by different inhibition levels of distractors, compared to the FI individuals. Results are interpreted in terms of the contemporary theories of AB that highlighted the inhibitory control over attention.

Self-prioritization effect in the attentional blink paradigm: Attention-based or familiarity-based effect?

The self-prioritization effect (SPE) refers to the advantage in processing stimuli associated with oneself. Here, we addressed the SPE in an attentional blink (AB) task. In Experiment 1, shapes associated to you, friend, or stranger served as T1, and letter X as T2. The AB effect was larger for you than the other label conditions, and larger for friend condition than for stranger condition. We suggest that self-associated shape increased its perceptual salience, producing greater attentional capture. In Experiment 2 participants trained with a shape-label matching task to increase familiarity with the shape-label associations before performing the AB task. The difference between friend and stranger conditions disappeared, suggesting that the difference between the two conditions observed in Experiment 1 was mainly due to differences in familiarity or frequency of use. Importantly, the advantage of you over friend and stranger conditions remained, suggesting that the SPE is a genuine effect.

Distrust before first sight? Examining knowledge- and appearance-based effects of trustworthiness on the visual consciousness of faces.

The present EEG study with 32 healthy participants investigated whether affective knowledge about a person influences the visual awareness of their face, additionally considering the impact of facial appearance. Faces differing in perceived trustworthiness based on appearance were associated with negative or neutral social information and shown as target stimuli in an attentional blink task. As expected, participants showed enhanced awareness of faces associated with negative compared to neutral social information. On the neurophysiological level, this effect was connected to differences in the time range of the early posterior negativity (EPN)-a component associated with enhanced attention and facilitated processing of emotional stimuli. The findings indicate that the social-affective relevance of a face based on emotional knowledge is accessed during a phase of attentional enhancement for conscious perception and can affect prioritization for awareness. In contrast, no clear evidence for influences of facial trustworthiness during the attentional blink was found.

Attentional blur and blink: Effects of adaptive attentional scaling on visual awareness.

Attentional scaling is a crucial mechanism that enables us to flexibly allocate our attention to larger or smaller regions in the visual field. Although previous studies have demonstrated the critical role of attentional scaling in visual processing, its impact on modulating visual awareness is not yet fully understood. This study investigates the adaptive control of attentional scaling and its influence on visual awareness in an attentional blink paradigm. Participants were required to attend to the first target's location, which was manipulated either session-wise, trial-wise, or such that it could be learned across a block of trials. Discrete, all-or-none, awareness was expected when attention was allocated to a narrow area, while gradual awareness was expected when attention was allocated to a larger area. We used mixture modeling to assess second target awareness across these different attentional scales. The results revealed that participants could adaptively control their attentional scale both across stable sessions, and through (implicit) statistical learning in blocks of successive trials. This produced gradual perceptual awareness when the participants adopted a broad attentional scale, causing an attentional "blur". However, trial-wise cues did not allow for attentional scaling, resulting in more discrete target perception overall, and an attentional "blink". We conclude that the attentional scale is to some extent under adaptive control during the attentional blink/blur, where it can produce qualitatively different modes of perceptual awareness.

Temporal deployment of attention in musicians: Evidence from an attentional blink paradigm.

The generalization of music training to unrelated nonmusical domains is well established and may reflect musicians' superior ability to regulate attention. We investigated the temporal deployment of attention in musicians and nonmusicians using scalp-recording of event-related potentials in an attentional blink (AB) paradigm. Participants listened to rapid sequences of stimuli and identified target and probe sounds. The AB was defined as a probe identification deficit when the probe closely follows the target. The sequence of stimuli was preceded by a neutral or informative cue about the probe position within the sequence. Musicians outperformed nonmusicians in identifying the target and probe. In both groups, cueing improved target and probe identification and reduced the AB. The informative cue elicited a sustained potential, which was more prominent in musicians than nonmusicians over left temporal areas and yielded a larger N1 amplitude elicited by the target. The N1 was larger in musicians than nonmusicians, and its amplitude over the left frontocentral cortex of musicians correlated with accuracy. Together, these results reveal musicians' superior ability to regulate attention, allowing them to prepare for incoming stimuli, thereby improving sound object identification. This capacity to manage attentional resources to optimize task performance may generalize to nonmusical activities.

The role of distractors in rapid serial visual presentation reveals the mechanism of attentional blink by EEG-based univariate and multivariate analyses.

Attentional blink pertains to the performance of participants with a severe decline in identifying the second target presented after the first target reported correctly within 200-500 ms in a rapid serial visual presentation. The current study was conducted to investigate the neural mechanism of the effect of the distractor (D1) that immediately follows first target to attentional blink by altering whether D1 was substituted with a blank with electroencephalography recording. The results showed that D1 interfered with the attentional enhancement and working memory encoding in both single-target rapid serial visual presentation task and dual-target rapid serial visual presentation task, which were mainly manifested in delayed and attenuated P3a and diminished P3b of first target. Single-trial analysis indicated that first target and second target will compete with each other for working memory encoding resources in short lag, but not in the long lag. In addition, D1 interfered with the working memory encoding of second target under short lag rather than long lag in the dual-target rapid serial visual presentation task. These results suggested that attentional blink can be attributed to the limited working memory encoding resource, whereas the amount of available resources is subject to modulation by attention. The D1 hinders the attention enhancement of first target, thereby exacerbating attentional blink.

An online browser-based attentional blink replication using visual objects.

The complex relationship between attention and visual perception can be exemplified and investigated through the Attentional Blink. The attentional blink is characterised by impaired attention to the second of two target stimuli, when both occur within 200 - 500ms. The attentional blink has been well studied in experimental lab settings. However, despite the rise of online methods for behavioural research, their suitability for studying the attentional blink has not been fully addressed yet, the main concern being the lack of control and timing variability for stimulus presentation. Here, we investigated the suitability of online testing for studying the attentional blink with visual objects. Our results show a clear attentional blink effect between 200 to 400ms following the distractor including a Lag 1 sparing effect in line with previous research despite significant inter-subject and timing variability. This work demonstrates the suitability of online methods for studying the attentional blink with visual objects, opening new avenues to explore its underlying processes.

Perceptual Awareness Occurs Along a Graded Continuum: No Evidence of All-or-None Failures in Continuous Reproduction Tasks.

Does sensory information reach conscious awareness in a discrete, all-or-nothing manner or a gradual, continuous manner? To answer this question, we examined behavioral performance across four different paradigms that manipulate visual awareness: the attentional blink, backward masking, the Sperling iconic memory paradigm, and retro-cuing. We then asked how well we could account for participants' (N = 112 adults) behavior using a signal detection framework that factors in psychophysical scaling to model participants' responses along a single continuum. We found that this model easily accounted for the data from each of these diverse paradigms. Moreover, we reanalyzed the data from prior studies that had posited a discrete view of perceptual awareness and found that our continuous signal detection model outperformed the models that had been used to support an all-or-nothing view of consciousness. This set of data is consistent with the idea that conscious awareness occurs along a graded continuum.

Differences in the duration of the attentional blink when viewing nature vs. urban scenes.

The current study examined how viewing nature vs. urban scenes impacts the duration of the attentional blink. Nature scenes produce a broader allocation of attention, allowing attention to spread and reduce the ability to disengage attention. Urban scenes produce a narrowed allocation of attention, allowing efficient encoding of relevant information, inhibition of irrelevant information and a speedier disengagement of attention. Participants viewed a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) of either nature or urban scenes. For both scene categories, an attentional blink was evident by reduced accuracy for reporting a second target that occurred two or three scenes after an accurately reported first target. However, the duration of the attentional blink was reduced for urban scenes compared with nature scenes. A peripheral target detection task confirmed a difference in the allocation of attention between scene categories. The peripheral targets were better detected for nature scenes, suggesting that participants have a broader spread of attention for nature scenes, even in an RSVP task. The shorter duration of the attentional blink for urban scenes was consistent across four experiments with small and large sets of urban and nature scenes. Therefore, urban scenes reliably reduce the attentional blink duration compared with nature scenes, and this could be attributed to a narrowed attention allocation that allows speedier disengagement of attention in an RSVP.

Cross-modal enhancement of spatially unpredictable visual target discrimination during the attentional blink.

The attentional blink can be substantially reduced by delivering a task-irrelevant sound synchronously with the second target (T2) embedded in a rapid serial visual presentation stream, which is further modulated by the semantic congruency between the sound and T2. The present study extended the cross-modal boost during attentional blink and the modulation of audiovisual semantic congruency in the spatial domain by showing that a spatially uninformative, semantically congruent (but not incongruent) sound could even improve the discrimination of spatially unpredictable T2 during attentional blink. T2-locked event-related potential (ERP) data yielded that the early cross-modal P195 difference component (184-234 ms) over the occipital scalp contralateral to the T2 location was larger preceding accurate than inaccurate discriminations of semantically congruent, but not incongruent, audiovisual T2s. Interestingly, the N2pc component (194-244 ms) associated with visual-spatial attentional allocation was enlarged for incongruent audiovisual T2s relative to congruent audiovisual and unisensory visual T2s only when they were accurately discriminated. These ERP findings suggest that the spatially extended cross-modal boost during attentional blink involves an early cross-modal interaction strengthening the perceptual processing of T2, without any sound-induced enhancement of visual-spatial attentional allocation toward T2. In contrast, the absence of an accuracy decrease in response to semantically incongruent audiovisual T2s may originate from the semantic mismatch capturing extra visual-spatial attentional resources toward T2.

Impact of depression and post-traumatic stress on manual and oculomotor performance in service members with a history of mild TBI.

OBJECTIVE: To determine the impact of depression and post-traumatic stress on an automated oculomotor and manual measure of visual attention, compared to conventional neuropsychological assessment. Setting: Military traumatic brain injury (TBI) rehabilitation program. PARTICIPANTS: 188 Active Duty Service Members (ADSM) with a history of mild TBI. DESIGN: A cross-sectional and correlational study with data obtained through an IRB-approved data registry study. Main measures: Bethesda Eye & Attention Measure (BEAM); brief neuropsychological battery; self-reported symptom surveys including Neurobehavioral Symptom Inventory (NSI), Patient Health Questionnaire-8 (PHQ-8), and PTSD Checklist-5 (PCL-5). RESULTS: Small effect sizes were found for partial correlations between both depression and post-traumatic stress and key BEAM metrics. In contrast, small-to-medium effects sizes were found across all traditional neuropsychological test measures. CONCLUSION: This study illustrates the profile of impairments associated with depression and post-traumatic stress on saccadic eye movements and manual responses to BEAM relative to conventional neuropsychological tests. Results demonstrated that among ADSM seen for mTBI, depression and PTS exert a significant negative impact on measures of processing speed, attention, executive function, and memory across saccadic, manual, and conventional neuropsychological tests. However, the unique psychometric features of each of these assessment approaches may assist in distinguishing the effects of psychiatric comorbidities within this population.

Blink rate and facial orientation reveal distinctive patterns of attentional engagement in autistic toddlers: a digital phenotyping approach.

Differences in social attention are well-documented in autistic individuals, representing one of the earliest signs of autism. Spontaneous blink rate has been used to index attentional engagement, with lower blink rates reflecting increased engagement. We evaluated novel methods using computer vision analysis (CVA) for automatically quantifying patterns of attentional engagement in young autistic children, based on facial orientation and blink rate, which were captured via mobile devices. Participants were 474 children (17-36 months old), 43 of whom were diagnosed with autism. Movies containing social or nonsocial content were presented via an iPad app, and simultaneously, the device's camera recorded the children's behavior while they watched the movies. CVA was used to extract the duration of time the child oriented towards the screen and their blink rate as indices of attentional engagement. Overall, autistic children spent less time facing the screen and had a higher mean blink rate compared to neurotypical children. Neurotypical children faced the screen more often and blinked at a lower rate during the social movies compared to the nonsocial movies. In contrast, autistic children faced the screen less often during social movies than during nonsocial movies and showed no differential blink rate to social versus nonsocial movies.

A key role of the hippocampal P3 in the attentional blink.

The attentional blink (AB) refers to an impaired identification of target stimuli (T2), which are presented shortly after a prior target (T1) within a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream. It has been suggested that the AB is related to a failed transfer of T2 into working memory and that hippocampus (HC) and entorhinal cortex (EC) are regions crucial for this transfer. Since the event-related P3 component has been linked to inhibitory processes, we hypothesized that the hippocampal P3 elicited by T1 may impact on T2 processing within HC and EC. To test this hypothesis, we reanalyzed microwire data from 21 patients, who performed an RSVP task, during intracranial recordings for epilepsy surgery assessment (Reber et al., 2017). We identified T1-related hippocampal P3 components in the local field potentials (LFPs) and determined the temporal onset of T2 processing in HC/EC based on single-unit response onset activity. In accordance with our hypothesis, T1-related single-trial P3 amplitudes at the onset of T2 processing were clearly larger for unseen compared to seen T2-stimuli. Moreover, increased T1-related single-trial P3 peak latencies were found for T2[unseen] versus T2[seen] trials in case of lags 1 to 3, which was in line with our predictions. In conclusion, our findings support inhibition models of the AB and indicate that the hippocampal P3 elicited by T1 plays a central role in the AB.

More than a feeling: The emotional attentional blink relies on non-emotional "pop out," but is weak compared to the attentional blink.

The attentional blink (AB) reveals temporal limits of goal-driven attention: the second of two proximate targets presented in a rapid stream of non-targets is often missed. In the emotional AB (EAB, also termed emotion-induced blindness), an emotionally valenced distractor replacing the first target yields a similar blink. However, the AB and EAB have not been adequately compared, and thus the extent of their mechanistic similarity remains unclear. The current study interleaved AB and EAB trials using identical stimuli in the same participants and observed that the AB is consistently larger than the EAB. Moreover, the four main experiments varied in both target-defining features (semantic vs. perceptual) and EAB distractor salience (emotion alone vs. emotion plus physical distinctiveness); an EAB was observed only when distractors were physically distinct. Even when a large EAB was observed, the AB was still larger using a task with identical targets and fillers in the same individuals. These results suggest that: (1) goal-driven attentional control (measured by the AB) has a greater influence than stimulus-driven attentional control (measured by the EAB: emotion valence and physical distinctiveness) on selection from a dynamic series of stimuli, and (2) emotional valence is insufficient on its own to trigger an EAB. However, these results are consistent with the account that when attention has already been captured by a physically salient distractor, emotional content can interfere with disengagement from the already-attended stimulus.