Manipulation of voice onset time during dichotic listening

The manipulation of voice onset time (VOT) during dichotic listening has provided novel insights regarding brain function. To date, the most common design is the utilisation of four VOT conditions: short-long pairs (SL), where a CV syllable with a short VOT is presented to the left ear and a CV syllable with a long VOT is presented to the right ear as well as long-short (LS), short-short (SS) and long-long (LL) pairs. Rimol, Eichele, and Hugdahl (2006) first reported that in healthy adults SL pairs elicit the largest REA while, in fact, LS pairs elicit a significant left ear advantage (LEA). This VOT effect was replicated by Sandmann et al. (2007). A study of children aged 5-8years of age has shown a developmental trajectory whereby long VOTs gradually start to dominate over short VOTs when LS pairs are being presented under dichotic conditions (Westerhausen, Helland, Ofte, & Hugdahl, 2010). Two studies have investigated attentional modulation of the VOT effect in children and adults. The converging evidence from these studies shows that at around 9years of age children lack the adult-like cognitive flexibility required to exert top-down control over stimulus-driven bottom-up processes (Andersson, Llera, Rimol, & Hugdahl, 2008; Arciuli, Rankine, & Monaghan, 2010). Arciuli et al. further demonstrated that this kind of cognitive flexibility is a predictor of proficiency with complex tasks such as reading. A review of each of these studies, the possible mechanisms underlying the VOT effect and directions for future research are discussed.     

Inhibitory control and empathy-related personality traits: sex-linked associations

We here report two studies exploring associations between inhibitory control (measured with the Sustained Attention to Response Task, SART) on the one hand, and self-reports of trait cooperativeness and empathy on the other. A coherent picture was obtained in women whose inhibitory control proficiency predicted higher scores on the Temperament and Character Inventory Cooperativeness and a higher Empathy Quotient. Individual differences in working memory did not predict self-reported empathy. In men, the association between SART performance and empathy was less clear: Good performance on the inhibitory task predicted lower scores on Cooperativeness and was unrelated to the Empathy Quotient. In both studies, women outperformed men on the SART. The results in women may reflect how individual differences in elemental neuro-cognitive operations such as inhibitory control influence more complex functions such as social cognition.     

Processing spatial relations with different apertures of attention

Neuropsychological studies suggest the existence of lateralized networks that represent categorical and coordinate types of spatial information. In addition, studies with neural networks have shown that they encode more effectively categorical spatial judgments or coordinate spatial judgments, if their input is based, respectively, on units with relatively small, nonoverlapping receptive fields, as opposed to units with relatively large, overlapping receptive fields. These findings leave open the question of whether interactive processes between spatial detectors and types of spatial relations can be modulated by spatial attention. We hypothesized that spreading the attention window to encompass an area that includes two objects promotes coordinate spatial relations, based on coarse coding by large, overlapping, receptive fields. In contrast, narrowing attention to encompass an area that includes only one of the objects benefits categorical spatial relations, by effectively parsing space. By use of a cueing procedure, the spatial attention window was manipulated to select regions of differing areas. As predicted, when the attention window was large, coordinate spatial transformations were noticed faster than categorical transformations; in contrast, when the attention window was relatively smaller, categorical spatial transformations were noticed faster than coordinate transformations. Another novel finding was that coordinate changes were noticed faster when cueing an area that included both objects as well as the empty space between them than when simultaneously cueing both areas including the objects while leaving the gap between them uncued.     

背景线索对室内场景中目标搜索的注意引导

以室内3D场景图为实验材料,采用眼动追踪技术,探讨背景线索对真实场景视觉搜索过程中的注意引导。结果发现：在室内场景目标搜索过程中存在背景线索效应,该效应基于对背景-目标共变关系的外显记忆;背景线索对搜索的启动和确认阶段无影响,对扫描阶段的注视行为有促进作用,有助于更有效地选择注视区域,将注视更直接地导向目标所在位置。     

On the role of attention in generating explicit awareness of contingent relations: evidence from spatial priming

In a series of four experiments, we examine the hypothesis that selective attention is crucial for the generation of conscious knowledge of contingency information. We investigated this question using a spatial priming task in which participants were required to localize a target letter in a probe display. In Experiment 1, participants kept track of the frequency with which the predictive letter in the prime appeared in various locations. This manipulation had a negligible impact on contingency awareness. Subsequent experiments requiring participants to attend to features (color, location) of the predictive letter increased contingency awareness somewhat, but there remained a large proportion of individuals who remained unaware of the strong contingency. Together the results of our experiments suggest that the construct of attention does not fully capture the processes that lead to contingency awareness, and suggest a critical role for bottom-up feature integration in explicit contingency learning.     

The neural substrates associated with inattentional blindness

Inattentional blindness is the failure to perceive salient stimuli presented at unattended locations. Whereas the behavioral manifestation of inattentional blindness has been investigated, the neural basis of this phenomenon has remained elusive. In the current study, event-related fMRI was used to identify the neural substrates associated with inattentional blindness. During central fixation, participants named colored digits presented at a peripheral location. On a subset of trials, an unexpected checkerboard circle (the critical stimulus) was presented at the same eccentricity along with the colored digits (a post-scan questionnaire assessed participants’ awareness of the critical stimulus). Neural activity during inattentional blindness was observed in the prefrontal cortex. Together with previous findings, these results call into question the widespread view that activity in the prefrontal cortex reflects conscious processing.     

Dissociative tendencies and right-hemisphere processing load: effects on vigilance performance

The present study was designed to explore the relationship between self-reported dissociative experiences and performance in tasks eliciting right-hemisphere processing load. Thirty-four participants (10 men and 24 women) performed a vigilance task in two conditions: with task-irrelevant negative-arousing pictures and task-irrelevant neutral pictures. Dissociation was assessed with the Dissociative Experience Scale. Consistent with theories positing right-hemisphere deregulation in high non-clinical dissociators, dissociative experiences correlated with greater vigilance decrement only in the negative picture condition. As both the vigilance task and negative picture processing are right lateralized, this result provides support for a right-hemisphere dysfunction in high dissociators, at least in negative conditions.     

Maintaining binding in working memory: comparing the effects of intentional goals and incidental affordances

Much research on memory for binding depends on incidental measures. However, if encoding associations benefits from conscious attention, then incidental measures of binding memory might not yield a sufficient understanding of how binding is accomplished. Memory for letters and spatial locations was compared in three within-participants tasks, one in which binding was not afforded by stimulus presentation, one in which incidental binding was possible, and one in which binding was explicitly to be remembered. Some evidence for incidental binding was observed, but unique benefits of explicit binding instructions included preserved discrimination as set size increased and drastic reduction in false alarms to lures that included a new spatial location and an old letter. This suggests that substantial cognitive benefits, including enhanced memory for features themselves, might occur through intentional binding, and that incidental measures of binding might not reflect these advantages.     

The premotor theory of attention and the Simon effect

In the paper by Hommel (2011-this issue), the roles of the theory of event coding (TEC) and the premotor theory of attention (PMTA) for the Simon effect were considered. PMTA was treated by Hommel in terms of the proposal that attentional orienting can be viewed as the preparation of a saccade towards a certain location, and was dismissed as providing no useful contribution for an attentional explanation of the Simon effect. Here we considered a more recent and broader conception of the PMTA, compared this approach with TEC, and confronted both approaches with a few studies focusing on the role of spatial attention for the Simon effect. It was argued that PMTA may account more easily for various studies examining the influence of spatial attention on the Simon effect. We concluded our paper by listing some elements that an overall encompassing theory on the Simon effect should contain.     

Visualizing the temporal dynamics of spatial information processing responsible for the Simon effect and its amplification by inhibition of return

Research has shown that the Simon effect is larger for targets suffering from inhibition of return (IOR). We used speed–accuracy trade-off (SAT) methodology to explore the temporal dynamics underlying this interaction. In Experiment 1, a new method for sorting the data was used to reveal a monotonic decay in the impact of task-irrelevant location information that is responsible for the Simon effect. In Experiment 2, we show that IOR delays both task-relevant identity and task-irrelevant location codes; a relatively longer delay for location than identity codes accounts for the effect of IOR on the Simon effect. When location information was made task-relevant in Experiment 3, IOR delayed the accumulation of this information by about the same amount as when location was irrelevant. The results suggest that IOR, therefore, has a greater effect on location than identity information.