Correction: Testing the Attentional Dwelling Hypothesis of Attentional Capture.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.5334/joc.48.].

Testing the Attentional Dwelling Hypothesis of Attentional Capture.

Researchers are strongly divided as to whether abrupt onsets capture spatial attention in a purely stimulus-driven fashion or contingent on their search goals. Recently, Gaspelin, Ruthruff and Lien (2016) offered a resolution of this debate by showing that whether spatial capture by abrupt onsets is observed in a spatial cueing search task critically depends on search difficulty. To account for these findings, they proposed an "attentional dwelling" hypothesis, according to which, following capture by a cue, attention dwells at the cued location until the object subsequently appearing at that location is identified as the target or rejected as a distractor. A critical prediction of this account is that the more similar to the target the distractor at the cued location, the longer attention should dwell at its location. Yet, Gaspelin et al. (2016) did not test this prediction because they manipulated overall search difficulty rather than the difficulty of rejecting a specific distractor. The present study provides a critical test of the attentional dwelling hypothesis, by also varying target-distractor similarity within a trial rather than only between trials. Although we closely replicated these authors' findings, the dwelling hypothesis passed the critical test in one of our two experiments. To accommodate the entire pattern of results observed here, we tentatively suggest a priority-accumulation framework, according to which cue validity effects do not necessarily index spatial shifts of attention, but instead, how much the cue speeds the resolution of the competition between the target and distractors in the search display.

Reducing antipsychotic-induced weight gain in schizophrenia: a double-blind placebo-controlled study of reboxetine-betahistine combination.

RATIONALE: Combination treatment with reboxetine, a selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor, and betahistine, a histamine H1 receptor agonist/H3 antagonist, was developed to produce complementary action in CNS pathways regulating appetite and body weight. In the present placebo-controlled study, we evaluated whether a reboxetine-betahistine combination attenuates olanzapine-induced weight gain in schizophrenia patients. METHOD: Forty-three inpatients with DSM-IV schizophrenic disorder participated in a randomized double-blind study. Reboxetine (4 mg/day) with betahistine (48 mg/day) (N = 29) or placebo (N = 14) was co-administered with olanzapine (10 mg/day) for 6 weeks. Mental status was assessed at baseline and endpoint with relevant rating scales. Intention-to-treat method was used for statistical analysis. RESULTS: Seven patients in the study group and four in the placebo group discontinued the trial. At the end of the trial, patients in the olanzapine/reboxetine + betahistine group gained significantly less weight than those in the olanzapine/placebo group [2.02 ± 2.37 and 4.77 ± 3.16 kg, respectively; t = 2. 89, degrees of freedom (df) = 41, p = 0.006]. The weight-attenuating effect of this combination was twofold larger than the weight-attenuating effect previously demonstrated with reboxetine alone. Significantly fewer patients in the study group than in the comparison group increased their initial weight by >7 %, the cutoff for clinically significant weight gain [3/29 (10.3 %) and 6/14 (42.9 %), respectively; χ (2) = 6.03, df = 1, p = 0.014]. The reboxetine-betahistine combination was safe and well tolerated. CONCLUSIONS: Reboxetine-betahistine combination produces a clinically meaningful attenuation of olanzapine-induced weight gain. These results justify direct comparison between the reboxetine-betahistine combination and reboxetine alone.