Attention focus during physical effort: The mediating role of task intensity

ObjectivesTenenbaum's (2001) [A social-cognitive perspective of perceived exertion and exertion tolerance. In R. N. Singer, H. Hausenblas, & C. Janelle (Eds.), Handbook of sport psychology (pp. 810–820). New York, NY:Wiley] exercise intensity-attention linkage model was used to design and carry out two studies to examine individuals’ attentional strategies during engagement in two physically demanding tasks, and the mediating effect of task intensity on attention focus.DesignAn experimental design was employed where thought classifications (associative vs. dissociative) during three stages of a handgrip task (study 1) and during 50%, 70%, and 90% VO₂ max effort in a cycling task (study 2) were subjected to non-parametric Chi-square analysis.MethodsMale and female participants were exposed to the increasing sensation of physical effort via two fatiguing tasks: an isometric handgrip task (n=35), and a stationary cycling task (n=13). During each task participants were instructed to vocally express their current thoughts—in sentences, phrases or words—continuously throughout the testing procedure. Participant's self-reported thoughts were recorded during the tasks, and later classified to reveal patterns of associative and dissociative attention focus.ResultsAttention focus was predominantly associative when task intensity was high. These findings are consistent with Tenenbaum's (2001) [A social-cognitive perspective of perceived exertion and exertion tolerance. In R. N. Singer, H. Hausenblas, & C. Janelle (Eds.), Handbook of sport psychology (pp. 810–820). New York, NY:Wiley] model postulating the relationship between exercise intensity and attention allocation, which maintains that above a given effort threshold physiological cues dominate attention focus.ConclusionsDuring conditions of high workload and prolonged duration, attention is focused on overwhelming physiological sensations, which dominate focal awareness. At this point an associative attention focus is almost unavoidable.     

Vision outside the focus of attention

We investigated the relationship between focal attention and a feature-gradient detection that is performed in a parallel manner. We found that a feature gradient can be detected without measurable impairment of performance even while a concurrent form-recognition task is carried out. In spite of the fact that the form-recognition task engages focal attention and thus removes attentive resources from the vicinity of the feature gradient. This outcome suggests strongly that certain perceptions concerning salient boundaries and singularities in a visual scene can be accomplished without the aid of resource-limited processes, such as focal attention, and, by implication, that there may exist two distinct perceptual faculties (one attentive, the other not) that are able to bring complementary kinds of visual information simultaneously to our awareness.     

Availability of related long-term memory during and after attention focus in working memory

In a series of four experiments, we investigated the magnitude and pattern of indirect, semantically mediated priming that emanates from various working memory (WM) processes. When such priming effects are taken to reflect temporary increases in the availability of long-term memory (ALTM), results suggest a close link between the amount and type of attention-driven processing in WM and the resulting accessibility of semantically related memory structures. Patterns of priming were equivalent when attention demands were prior to, versus concurrent with, the priming measures, suggesting that ALTM processes either require no additional cognitive resources or require resources that are independent of those underlying effortful WM processes. The results are discussed with respect to emerging evidence for long-term semantic priming and models of WM that incorporate active but unattended information as part of a limited capacity cognitive workspace.     

Limits in controlling the focus of attention

Abstract

In a series of five experiments, we attempted to answer three questions concerning the flexibility of visuospatial attention: Is it possible to exert control on the shape of the attentional focus? Can attention be distributed not uniformly but in a gradient fashion within the focus? Does the way in which attentional resources are distributed within the focus affect the way in which they are distributed outside its borders? We provide evidence indicating that observers successfully allocated attention to the cued region. When the cued region was demarcated by a polygon, target detection was speeded up within the polygon. The results also show that the observers were unable to suppress information arising from an irrelevant location falling between two relevant locations (Experiments 1, 2, 3A and 3B). In accord with the zoom lens model, we interpret these results as suggesting that attention forms a unitary zone that may expand to encompass multiple relevant locations but must also include the area between them. In addition, we found that some sort of lateral masking effect occurred when the borders were close to the target location. In Experiment 4, we obtained a gradient inside     

Mental effort and task interference in auditory attention

Dual-task performance was examined in three experiments. The primary task was to repeat or to add one to four digits presented auditorily at a rate of 1 digit/second. This primary task was combined with three different secondary tasks in which subjects listened to a list of words either for later recognition of some of the words (Experiment 1) or for detection and a later report of a target word (Experiments 2 and 3). Different patterns of task interference were obtained. Recognition performance was sensitive to between-task variations in capacity demands but did not reflect momentary attentional demands within the primary task. Detection performance reflected both between-task and within-task variation in capacity demands of the primary task. The interference between the primary and the secondary task was mutual, with more interference when the selection-cue in the detection task was a category name than when it was the target word itself. These findings are discussed in terms of effort theory of attention and the role of attentional strategies in dual-task performance.     

Assessing the influence of dimensional focus during situation model construction

According to Zwaan, Langston, and Graesser's (1995) event-indexing model, when comprehending text, readers monitor changes in a series of critical dimensions: space, time, protagonist, causality, and intentionality. In this study, the influence of dimensional focus was assessed during situation-model construction. Participants read narratives and were instructed to specifically monitor a single dimension while their sentence reading times were recorded. Critical sentence reading times were then analyzed for all shift types. Results support the general prediction that at least the time and protagonist dimensions are resistant to task demands, demonstrating that comprehenders routinely perform dimensional updating processes that are context independent. These results are discussed in the context of the event-indexing model.     

Illusory conjunctions inside and outside the focus of attention

This article addresses 2 questions that arise from the finding that visual scenes are first parsed into visual features: (a) the accumulation of location information about objects during their recognition and (b) the mechanism for the binding of the visual features. The first 2 experiments demonstrated that when 2 colored letters were presented outside the initial focus of attention, illusory conjunctions between the color of one letter and the shape of the other were formed only if the letters were less than 1 degree apart. Separation greater than 2 degrees resulted in fewer conjunction errors than expected by chance. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that inside the spread of attention, illusory conjunctions between the 2 letters can occur regardless of the distance between them. In addition, these experiments demonstrated that the span of attention can expand or shrink like a spotlight. The results suggest that features inside the focus of attention are integrated by an expandable focal attention mechanism that conjoins all features that appear inside its focus. Visual features outside the focus of attention may be registered with coarse location information prior to their integration. Alternatively, a quick and imprecise shift of attention to the periphery may lead to illusory conjunctions among adjacent stimuli.     

Revisiting the global-dominance phenomenon outside the focus of attention

Previous research has demonstrated global dominance for attended and unattended stimuli. In this paper, this phenomenon is shown to be restricted to small compound stimuli. As a first step, local dominance was obtained with large (8 deg in height) attended stimuli when a single stimulus was displayed. Next, dominance in attended and unattended stimuli was investigated by displaying two large compound stimuli, one surrounded by a square (attended compound stimulus), the other one enclosed in a circle (unattended compound stimulus). The way attention was directed to the attended stimulus was varied. No dominance was observed when subjects were instructed to process the stimulus appearing in the square (experiment 2). However, when a rapid-onset cue pre-directed attention to the attended stimulus, local dominance emerged for attended, but not for unattended stimuli (experiment 3). This latter result was obtained whether or not subjects were more experienced at local than global processing (experiment 4). The implications of the results for the locus of processing dominance are discussed.     

Cognitive effort during note taking

Note taking is a complex activity that requires comprehension and selection of information and written production processes. Here we review the functions, abbreviation procedures, strategies, and working memory constraints of note taking with the aim of improving theoretical and practical understanding of the activity. The time urgency of selecting key points and recording them while comprehending new information at the same time places significant demands on the central executive and other components of working memory. Dual‐ and triple‐task procedures allow the measurement of the momentary cognitive effort or executive attention allocated to note taking. Comparative data show that note taking demands more effort than reading or learning. However, it requires less effort than the creative written composition of an original text. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Processing of threat-related information outside the focus of visual attention

This study investigates whether threat-related words are especially likely to be perceived in unattended locations of the visual field. Threat-related, positive, and neutral words were presented at fixation as probes in a lexical decision task. The probe word was preceded by 2 simultaneous prime words (1 foveal, i.e., at fixation; 1 parafoveal, i.e., 2.2 deg. of visual angle from fixation), which were presented for 150 ms, one of which was either identical or unrelated to the probe. Results showed significant facilitation in lexical response times only for the probe threat words when primed parafoveally by an identical word presented in the right visual field. We conclude that threat-related words have privileged access to processing outside the focus of attention. This reveals a cognitive bias in the preferential, parallel processing of information that is important for adaptation.     

Object-based selection within and beyond the focus of spatial attention

In a series of experiments, we examined the effect of perceptual objects on visual attentional processing in the presence of spatially cued attentional selection. Subjects made speeded judgments about two visual elements that were either both on the same object or on two different objects. Judgments were faster when the elements were on the same object than when they were on different objects, revealing an object advantage. Importantly, the object advantage remained even when either exogenous or endogenous spatial cues were used to direct the subjects' attention to a part of the display, contrary to earlier findings of other researchers. The object advantage, however, did disappear when the stimulus duration was shortened substantially. The results show that object-based selection is pervasive and is not diminished by the act of selective attention. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for the mechanisms that underlie attentional selection.     

Characteristics that help mothers maintain their infants'' focus of attention

Disadvantaged mothers' use of interactive strategies which maintained their infants' focus of attention were examined at 6, 12, and 24 months to evaluate for patterns in this interactive strategy and determine if patterns could be predicted from early infant and maternal characteristics. Four distinct clusters were identified with mothers in each cluster increasing in their use of maintaining over time but differing in the age at which the increase occurred. While infants' biologic risk was unrelated to cluster membership, more positive scores on mothers' perceptions of child rearing history, child rearing attitudes, self-esteem, and social support when the infants were 6 months old were reported by mothers who displayed a pattern of high levels and steady increase in maintaining. More negative scores on these characteristics were reported by mothers who displayed low levels of maintaining and delays in increasing this interactive strategy. Results are discussed in light of disadvantaged mothers' ability to adapt to their infants' changing needs and early identification of mothers' who may have greater difficulty in the adaptational process.     

Personally-significant information affects performance only within the focus of attention: a direct manipulation of attention

It has been suggested that personally significant (PS) information interferes with performance only when presented within the focus of attention. However, this claim was never tested by a systematic manipulation of attention, but only by using correlative measures of its locus. We addressed this issue in two experiments, utilizing a cued visual search paradigm that allowed us to directly manipulate attention and to measure behavioral and physiological responses. One of the stimuli in the search display had a higher luminance value (i.e., was cued), and, orthogonally, one of the stimuli could be a PS or neutral name. When the cue did not predict target location, PS distractors mildly interfered with task performance, regardless of the cue's location. However, when the cue predicted target location, responses were facilitated for cued targets, indicating that attention was shifted to the cue. Importantly, PS distractors interfered with task performance and elicited enhanced orienting responses only when they were cued. This implies that PS information affects performance only when presented within but not outside the focus of attention.     

EMG activity as a function of the performer's focus of attention

In previous studies of attentional focus effects, investigators have measured performance outcome. Here, however, the authors used electromyography (EMG) to determine whether difference between external and internal foci would also be manifested at the neuromuscular level. In 2 experiments, participants (N=11, Experiment 1; N=12, Experiment 2) performed biceps curls while focusing on the movements of the curl bar (external focus) or on their arms (internal focus). In Experiment 1, movements were performed faster under external than under internal focus conditions. Also, integrated EMG (iEMG) activity was reduced when performers adopted an external focus. In Experiment 2, movement time was controlled through the use of a metronome, and iEMG activity was again reduced under external focus conditions. Those findings are in line with the constrained action hypothesis (G. Wulf, N. McNevin, & C. H. Shea, 2001), according to which an external focus promotes the use of more automatic control processes.     

Critical reading effort during text revision

This study concerns one of the processes involved in written verbal production: text revising. Our aim was to experimentally test the specificity of reading for revision as compared to reading for comprehension, and to determine the cognitive cost of initiating and performing critical-reading processes. A two-session experiment was conducted on students who had to perform a comprehension task and a revising task on a text presented in its basic version, or in a version containing either syntax errors or spelling errors. An analysis of the cognitive effort associated with critical-reading and comprehension-reading processes, and of the participants’ comprehension and revising performance, showed that critical reading was more effortful than comprehension reading. It showed also that critical reading was more effortful for the text version with syntax errors than with spelling mistakes. In addition, the working memory span of the readers/revisers had a different impact on effort and performance, depending on the type of errors in the text (spelling or syntax).     

Dual n-back training increases the capacity of the focus of attention

Working memory (WM) training has been reported to benefit abilities as diverse as fluid intelligence (Jaeggi et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105:6829–6833, 2008) and reading comprehension (Chein & Morrison, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 17:193–199, 2010), but transfer is not always observed (for reviews, see Morrison & Chein, Psychonomics Bulletin & Review, 18:46–60, 2011; Shipstead et al., Psychological Bulletin, 138:628–654, 2012). In contrast, recent WM training studies have consistently reported improvement on the trained tasks. The basis for these training benefits has received little attention, however, and it is not known which WM components and/or processes are being improved. Therefore, the goal of the present study was to investigate five possible mechanisms underlying the effects of adaptive dual n-back training on working memory (i.e., improvements in executive attention, updating, and focus switching, as well as increases in the capacity of the focus of attention and short-term memory). In addition to a no-contact control group, the present study also included an active control group whose members received nonadaptive training on the same task. All three groups showed significant improvements on the n-back task from pretest to posttest, but adaptive training produced larger improvements than did nonadaptive training, which in turn produced larger improvements than simply retesting. Adaptive, but not nonadaptive, training also resulted in improvements on an untrained running span task that measured the capacity of the focus of attention. No other differential improvements were observed, suggesting that increases in the capacity of the focus of attention underlie the benefits of adaptive dual n-back training.     

Further evidence for a time-independent shift of the focus of attention

The separation between stimuli was manipulated in a same-different matching task. In Experiment 1, stimuli were upright Ts and/or Ls, whereas in Experiment 2, they were rotated Ts and/or Ls. In both experiments, mean reaction time (RT) for the same-different judgment did not increase as a function of interletter separation, suggesting either that the time needed to relocate attention was independent of distance, or that the stimuli were processed in parallel. These alternatives were tested in a third experiment, with a diagnostic for parallel processing proposed by Egeth and Dagenbach (1991). The diagnostic indicated that the rotated Ts and Ls in Experiment 2 were processed serially. If serial processing implies the utilization of attention, then the results of Experiment 2 suggest that relocation of attention is time-invariant with respect to distance.     

Increasing the distance of an external focus of attention enhances learning

Previous studies (e.g., Wulf, H?ss, & Prinz, 1998) have shown that motor learning can be enhanced by directing performers' attention to the effects of their movements ("external focus"), rather than to the body movements producing the effect ("internal focus"). The purpose of the present study was to test the hypothesis that increasing the distance between the body and the action effects might further enhance the learning advantages associated with an external focus of attention. The distance of the external effect was manipulated by instructing three groups of participants learning to balance on a stabilometer to focus on markers attached to the platform located at different distances from their feet. Specifically, two groups were to focus on distant markers on the outside ("far-outside") or inside ("far-inside") of the platform, respectively, whereas another group was instructed to focus on markers close to their feet ("near"). In a retention test administered after two days of practice, all three external-focus groups showed generally more effective balance learning than an internal-focus control group. In addition, the far-outside and far-inside groups demonstrated similar performances, and both were more effective than the near group. Furthermore, the far-outside and far-inside groups showed higher-frequency movement adjustments than the near group. These results suggest that focusing on more distant effects results in enhanced learning by promoting the utilization of more natural control mechanisms. The findings are in line with a "constrained action" hypothesis that accounts for the relatively poorer learning associated with an attentional focus directed towards effects in close proximity to the body, or towards the body itself.