The relationship between visual attention and expertise in sports

ObjectivesGiven the prevalence of misperception and failed perception, particularly in attention-demanding team sports, surprisingly few studies have explored whether experts in team sports differ from other athletes and from non-athletes in their basic attention abilities.MethodIn this study, we examined group differences between experts in team handball (n = 40), athletes from non-team sports (n = 40), and novice athletes (n = 40) using a battery of three attention tasks: a functional field of view task, a multiple-object tracking task, and an inattentional blindness task.ResultsPerformance on the three attention tasks was largely independent, with no significant correlations among the tasks. Team sports experts showed no better performance on the basic attention tasks than did athletes from non-teams sports or novice athletes.ConclusionsThe finding that all basic attention tasks are largely independent provides preliminary support for the idea that attentional breadth, tracking performance, and inattentional blindness are distinct attentional processes. Our results demonstrate that sports expertise effects are unrelated to basic differences in attention—expertise does not appear to produce differences in basic attention and basic differences in attention do not appear to predict eventual expertise. Further experiments could focus on the ways in which more specific attentional strategies and processes contribute to sports performance.     

The elephant in the room: collaboration and competition among relief organizations during high-profile disasters

The non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that assume the bulk of emergency care during large-scale disasters in the developing world must expend considerable time and resources to ensure donations to sustain their field operations. This long-standing dilemma for the humanitarian community can create a competitive environment that: Compromises the delivery and quality of services, Allows the effectiveness of operations to be compromised by a lack of cooperation and collaboration, Disrupts the timely and accurate coordination and analysis of outcome measures that are crucial to successful response in the future, and Undermines the long-term capacity of indigenous aid organizations. This article addresses problems and potential solutions for improved coordination and long-term capacity-building of humanitarian aid.     

Natural scene categorization with minimal attention: evidence from negative priming

Research has demonstrated that objects in natural scenes are categorized without the deployment of attention. However, in these types of studies, participants were required to directly respond to peripherally presented scenes, which might lead some participants to move their attention. If this is the case, the above conclusion concerning natural scenes may not be valid. We investigated this issue by using a negative priming (NP) paradigm in which participants did not directly respond to peripheral stimuli. Our results showed NP effect from ignored stimuli in natural scene categorization, but neither in letter discrimination (Experiment 1) nor in line-drawing categorization (Experiment 2). In addition, NP effects were observed even when probe stimuli were words (Experiments 3A and 3B). These findings suggest that people can categorize objects in natural scenes with minimal attention, that this process is specific to natural scenes, and that it is based on the semantic information of the images.     

The relative contribution of scene context and target features to visual search in scenes

Many experiments have shown that knowing a targets visual features improves search performance over knowing the target name. Other experiments have shown that scene context can facilitate object search in natural scenes. In this study, we investigated how scene context and target features affect search performance. We examined two possible sources of information from scene context—the scenes gist and the visual details of the scene—and how they potentially interact with target-feature information. Prior to commencing search, participants were shown a scene and a target cue depicting either a picture or the category name (or no-information control). Using eye movement measures, we investigated how the target features and scene context influenced two components of search: early attentional guidance processes and later verification processes involved in the identification of the target. We found that both scene context and target features improved guidance, but that target features also improved speed of target recognition. Furthermore, we found that a scenes visual details played an important role in improving guidance, much more so than did the scenes gist alone.     

Gaze cues influence the allocation of attention in natural scene viewing

In two experiments we examined whether the allocation of attention in natural scene viewing is influenced by the gaze cues (head and eye direction) of an individual appearing in the scene. Each experiment employed a variant of the flicker paradigm in which alternating versions of a scene and a modified version of that scene were separated by a brief blank field. In Experiment 1, participants were able to detect the change made to the scene sooner when an individual appearing in the scene was gazing at the changing object than when the individual was absent, gazing straight ahead, or gazing at a nonchanging object. In addition, participants' ability to detect change deteriorated linearly as the changing object was located progressively further from the line of regard of the gazer. Experiment 2 replicated this change detection advantage of gaze-cued objects in a modified procedure using more critical scenes, a forced-choice change/no-change decision, and accuracy as the dependent variable. These findings establish that in the perception of static natural scenes and in a change detection task, attention is preferentially allocated to objects that are the target of another's social attention.     

Gaze cues influence the allocation of attention in natural scene viewing

In two experiments we examined whether the allocation of attention in natural scene viewing is influenced by the gaze cues (head and eye direction) of an individual appearing in the scene. Each experiment employed a variant of the flicker paradigm in which alternating versions of a scene and a modified version of that scene were separated by a brief blank field. In Experiment 1, participants were able to detect the change made to the scene sooner when an individual appearing in the scene was gazing at the changing object than when the individual was absent, gazing straight ahead, or gazing at a nonchanging object. In addition, participants' ability to detect change deteriorated linearly as the changing object was located progressively further from the line of regard of the gazer. Experiment 2 replicated this change detection advantage of gaze-cued objects in a modified procedure using more critical scenes, a forced-choice change/no-change decision, and accuracy as the dependent variable. These findings establish that in the perception of static natural scenes and in a change detection task, attention is preferentially allocated to objects that are the target of another's social attention.     

Templates for rejection: configuring attention to ignore task-irrelevant features

Theories of attention are compatible with the idea that we can bias attention to avoid selecting objects that have known nontarget features. Although this may underlie several existing phenomena, the explicit guidance of attention away from known nontargets has yet to be demonstrated. Here we show that observers can use feature cues (i.e., color) to bias attention away from nontarget items during visual search. These negative cues were used to quickly instantiate a template for rejection that reliably facilitated search across the cue-to-search stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs), although negative cues were not as potent as cues that guide attention toward target features. Furthermore, by varying the search set size we show a template for rejection is increasingly effective in facilitating search as scene complexity increases. Our findings demonstrate that knowing what not to look for can be used to configure attention to avoid certain features, complimenting what is known about setting attention to select certain target features.     

Asymmetries in infants' attention to the presence or absence of features

Three experiments were performed to test whether infants show a bias for detecting the presence of a feature in a stimulus rather than its absence. In the 1st experiment, 24 16-week-old infants were given 3 paired-comparison problems, each of which included a 25-s familiarization phase followed by 2 test trials. Infants were familiarized to 1 member of a set of capital alphabetical letters (E-F; Q-O; B-R). Then they were given a paired-comparison recognition test under 1 of 2 conditions. In the feature-present condition, the familiar letter (e.g., F) was paired with a novel letter containing the addition of a distinguishing element (e.g., E). In the feature-absent condition, infants were presented with a familiar letter (e.g., E) paired with a novel letter in which 1 element was removed (e.g., F). Infants showed a novelty preference to the letter in which the distinguishing feature was present, but there was no preference for novelty in the feature-absent condition. The 2nd experiment showed that infants' fixation to the letter containing the presence of the feature was not due to a simple preference for the letter with the greater number of elements. Finally, to test whether infants' failure to discriminate the absence was due to insufficient encoding time, 36 infants were tested in a 3rd experiment in which familiarization time was varied. After 20 s of familiarization, no evidence of discrimination was observed in either the feature-present or feature-absent condition. After 30 s, however, infants could discriminate the novel letter in the feature-present condition but not in the feature-absent condition. The significance of these results is discussed in terms of theoretical explanations for the development of the feature-presence bias.     

The Attentional Boost Effect: Transient increases in attention to one task enhance performance in a second task

Recent work on event perception suggests that perceptual processing increases when events change. An important question is how such changes influence the way other information is processed, particularly during dual-task performance. In this study, participants monitored a long series of distractor items for an occasional target as they simultaneously encoded unrelated background scenes. The appearance of an occasional target could have two opposite effects on the secondary task: It could draw attention away from the second task, or, as a change in the ongoing event, it could improve secondary task performance. Results were consistent with the second possibility. Memory for scenes presented simultaneously with the targets was better than memory for scenes that preceded or followed the targets. This effect was observed when the primary detection task involved visual feature oddball detection, auditory oddball detection, and visual color-shape conjunction detection. It was eliminated when the detection task was omitted, and when it required an arbitrary response mapping. The appearance of occasional, task-relevant events appears to trigger a temporal orienting response that facilitates processing of concurrently attended information (Attentional Boost Effect).     

Visual attention in adolescents: Facilitating effects of sport expertise and acute physical exercise

ObjectivesThis study investigated visual attention of adolescent orienteers and physically active adolescents non-practising orienteering both at rest and under acute sub-maximal exercise. It was verified whether the practice of orienteering facilitates the development of visual attentional abilities and whether orienteers, who are used to simultaneously handle physiological and cognitive-attentional loads, may better profit than non-orienteers from the beneficial effects of sub-maximal physical load on processing speed.MethodsBoth the focusing of attention at foveal and parafoveal locations and the orienting of attention at peripheral locations were investigated. In two discriminative reaction time (RT) experiments, a cue of varying size was presented centrally or peripherally and followed by a compound stimulus with local and global target features. The stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) varied between a short and a long interval.ResultsIn both experiments, adolescent orienteers and non-practisers showed different patterns of attentional effects. Adolescent orienteers were more similar to young adults in the attentional performance, being better able than non-practisers to perform complex attentional operations involving the intentional zooming of attention in the central visual field and the orienting of the attentional focus in the peripheral visual field. Also, both orienteers and non-orienteers speeded up their performance during exercise, but this facilitation effect was more pronounced for orienteers, who are probably skilled in directing the available resources to task demands.ConclusionsOur results suggest that cognitive expertise represents a key factor in sports that accelerates the development of visual attention and enhances the facilitating effects of physical exercise on attentional performance.     

Pay attention! Attention to the primes increases attitude assessment accuracy

We demonstrate that an oft-used indirect attitude assessment technique—the attitude activation paradigm—accurately assesses attitudes only when participants attend to the prime stimuli during the attitude activation task. Attitude activation attitudes toward obviously valenced words (e.g., torture, liberty) were more sensitive to attitude valence and extremity when participants were required to attend to the prime words than when they attended to a competing stimulus. As a result, we observed a significantly stronger correlation between attitude activation attitudes and a direct, self-report attitude measure when participants attended to the primes than when they ignored them. We conclude that failing to require participants to attend to the primes during the attitude activation task results in a flawed measurement, which could lead researchers to underestimate relations between the attitude activation measure and direct, self-report attitude measures.     

Physical abuse amplifies attention to threat and increases anxiety in children

Two experiments using event-related potentials (ERPs) examined the extent to which early traumatic experiences affect children's ability to regulate voluntary and involuntary attention to threat. The authors presented physically abused and nonabused comparison children with conflicting auditory and visual emotion cues, posed by children's mothers or a stranger, to examine the effect of emotion, modality, and poser familiarity on attention regulation. Relative to controls, abused children overattended to task-relevant visual and auditory anger cues. They also attended more to task-irrelevant auditory anger cues. Furthermore, the degree of attention allocated to threat statistically mediated the relationship between physical abuse and child-reported anxiety. These findings indicate that extreme emotional experiences may promote vulnerability for anxiety by influencing the development of attention regulation abilities.     

The role of selective attention in visual awareness of stimulus features: Electrophysiological studies

Attention and awareness are closely related, but the nature of their relationship is unclear. The present study explores the timing and temporal evolution of their interaction with event-related potentials. The participants attended to specific conjunctions of spatial frequency and orientation in masked (unaware) and unmasked (aware) visual stimuli. A correlate of awareness appeared 100-200 msec from stimulus onset similarly to both attended and unattended features. Selection negativity (SN), a correlate of attentional selection, emerged in response to both masked and unmasked stimuli after 200 msec. This double dissociation between correlates of awareness and SN suggests that the electrophysiological processes associated with feature-based attentional selection and visual awareness of features can be dissociated from each other at early stages of processing. In a passive task, requiring no attention to the stimuli, early electrophysiological responses (before 200 msec) related to awareness were attenuated, suggesting that focal attention modulates visual awareness earlier than does selective feature-based attention.     

The evidence rejects the expertise hypothesis: reply to Gauthier & Bukach

In Robbins, R. & McKone, E. (2006). No face-like processing for object-of-expertise in three behavioural tasks. Cognition this issue, we showed face-like holistic/configural processing does not occur for objects-of-expertise on standard paradigms including inversion, part-whole, part-in-configurally-transformed-whole, and the standard composite task. In this reply to the discussion by Gauthier, I., & Bukach, C. (2006). Should we reject the expertise hypothesis? Cognition, this issue, we focus on several issues: the fact that they do not dispute our review of previous data; the strength of null effects obtained from multiple studies and paradigms; the evidence for domain-specificity of the neural substrate supporting face processing; the difference between the expertise hypothesis (as a theory about the origin of face processing) and studies of how experience affects object processing in general; and the problems with G&B's proposed alteration to the standard composite paradigm. We argue that overwhelming evidence suggests the expertise hypothesis should be put to rest so that researchers can focus on what the origin of "special" processing for faces actually is, and investigate the many interesting changes to object recognition that do occur with experience.     

Eye movement trajectories in active visual search: Contributions of attention, memory, and scene boundaries to pattern formation

We relate the roles of attention, memory, and spatial constraints to pattern formation in eye movement trajectories previously measured in a conjunctive visual search task. Autocorrelations and power spectra of saccade direction cosines confirm a bias to progress forwardly, while turning at the display boundaries, plus a long-range memory component for the search path. Analyses of certain measures of circulation and imbalance in the eye trajectories, and their relations with the display area correspondingly subtended, bear signatures of spiraling or circulating patterns. We interpret their prevalence as mainly due to the interactions between three basic psychoneural mechanisms (conspicuity area, forward bias, long-range memory) and two task-specific geometric- spatial constraints on the eye trajectories (central start and display confinement). Conversely, computer simulations of random walks in which all psychoneural mechanisms are eliminated, while geometric-spatial constraints are maintained, show no prevalence of circulating patterns by those measures. We did find certain peculiarities of some individual participants in their pattern selections, but they appear too casual and incidental to suggest more systematic or complex search strategies in our randomized displays of uninformative stimuli.     

Example‐based learning: Effects of model expertise in relation to student expertise

Background. Worked examples are very effective for novice learners. They typically present a written‐out ideal (didactical) solution for learners to study. Aims. This study used worked examples of patient history taking in physiotherapy that presented a non‐didactical solution (i.e., based on actual performance). The effects of model expertise (i.e., worked example based on advanced, third‐year student model or expert physiotherapist model) in relation to students' expertise (i.e., first‐ or second‐year) were investigated. Sample. One hundred and thirty‐four physiotherapy students (61 first‐year and 73 second‐year). Methods. Design was 2×2 factorial with factors ‘Student Expertise’ (first‐year vs. second‐year) and ‘Model Expertise’ (expert vs. advanced student). Within expertise levels, students were randomly assigned to the Expert Example or the Advanced Student Example condition. All students studied two examples (content depending on their assigned condition) and then completed a retention and test task. They rated their invested mental effort after each example and test task. Results. Second‐year students invested less mental effort in studying the examples, and in performing the retention and transfer tasks than first‐year students. They also performed better on the retention test, but not on the transfer test. In contrast to our hypothesis, there was no interaction between student expertise and model expertise: all students who had studied the Expert examples performed better on the transfer test than students who had studied Advanced Student Examples. Conclusions. This study suggests that when worked examples are based on actual performance, rather than an ideal procedure, expert models are to be preferred over advanced student models.     

Deployment of attention to the configuration of features in facelike patterns by ten-week-old infants

Abstract

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the response of 10-week-old infants to the configuration of features in facelike patterns. In each experiment a series of preview trials was shown before. facelike patterns were presented on test trials. Preview stimuli were schematic drawings with non-facial configurations (Experiment 1), schematic drawings with facial configurations (Experiment 2), or photographs of men's and women's faces (Experiment 3). Test stimuli in all three experiments were facelike drawings that differed in the number and the configuration of their stimulus features.