Influencing the occurrence of mind wandering while reading

The current concerns hypothesis suggests that directing attention towards unfulfilled plans of the individual prior to a task would result in more off-task thoughts (or mind wandering). In this experiment, participants were asked to read a scientific text and self-report instances of mind wandering by indicating when they were experiencing task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs) or task-related interferences (TRIs). Prior to reading, participants in the individual plans experimental condition were asked to reflect upon their short-term plans by making a “to do” list while participants in a control condition were asked to make a list of the components of an automobile. In support of the current concerns hypothesis, directing attention towards the short-term plans resulted in significantly more TUTs, but not TRIs. Furthermore, participants in the individual plans condition had significantly lower scores on an assessment of reading comprehension, and this relationship was mediated by the frequency of TUTs.     

Stroke me for longer this touch feels too short: The effect of pleasant touch on temporal perception

Negative, painful, somatosensory stimulation lengthens the perceived duration of time. However, to date, no research has explored the influence of positive, pleasant, somatosensory stimulation on temporal perception. Here we asked whether gentle stroking touch influences perceptions of duration. Pleasant (gentle) and mildly unpleasant (rough) tactile stimulation was delivered whilst participants estimated the duration of a neutral visual stimulus. Pleasant touch resulted in shorter estimates of duration than unpleasant touch. There was no difference in duration perception in the unpleasant and control conditions. Taken together with the results of previous research (Ogden, Moore, Redfern, & McGlone, 2015), the results of this study suggest that pleasant and painful somatosensory stimulation have opposing effects on temporal perception, and additionally that pleasant touch can alter aspects of perceptual and attentional processing outside the purely affective domain.     

Examining the relationship between skilled music training and attention

While many aspects of cognition have been investigated in relation to skilled music training, surprisingly little work has examined the connection between music training and attentional abilities. The present study investigated the performance of skilled musicians on cognitively demanding sustained attention tasks, measuring both temporal and visual discrimination over a prolonged duration. Participants with extensive formal music training were found to have superior performance on a temporal discrimination task, but not a visual discrimination task, compared to participants with no music training. In addition, no differences were found between groups in vigilance decrement in either type of task. Although no differences were evident in vigilance per se, the results indicate that performance in an attention-demanding temporal discrimination task was superior in individuals with extensive music training. We speculate that this basic cognitive ability may contribute to advantages that musicians show in other cognitive measures.     

The modulation of reward priority by top-down knowledge

Reward-associated features capture attention automatically and continue to do so even when the reward contingencies are removed. This profile has led to the hypothesis that rewards belong to a separate class of attentional biases that is neither typically top-down nor bottom-up. The goal of these experiments was to understand the degree to which top-down knowledge can modulate value-driven attentional capture within (a) the timecourse of a single trial and (b) when the reward contingencies change explicitly over trials. The results suggested that top-down knowledge does not affect the size of value-driven attentional capture within a single trial. There were clear top-down modulations in the magnitude of value-driven capture when reward contingencies explicitly changed, but the original reward associations continued to have a persistent bias on attention. These results contribute to a growing body of evidence that reward associations bias attention through mechanisms separate from other top-down and bottom-up attentional biases.     

Money talks in attention bias modification: Reward in a dot-probe task affects attentional biases

Attention bias modification (ABM) aimed at correcting dysfunctional biases in anxiety patients has met with only mild success. Inspired by recent studies showing large effects of financial reward upon attention shifts, we contrasted effects of traditional dot-probe ABM and reward upon attention biases in a between-subject 2 × 2 design. Twenty-seven participants in group cognitive behavioural therapy (GCBT) for social anxiety disorder (SAD) were randomly assigned to undergo six sessions of a dot-probe task consisting of ABM or placebo ABM along with random or high reward following neutral stimuli. There was no influence of ABM on participants' attention bias over and above the influence of GCBT. Reward, however, had a strong influence on attention bias. Neither ABM nor reward reduced SAD symptoms over and above the effects of GCBT. The results add to the growing evidence that benefits of ABM through dot-probe training are unreliable but suggest on the other hand that rewarding attention may strongly influence dysfunctional attention biases.     

The relationship between ADHD symptoms and driving behavior in college students: The mediating effects of negative emotions and emotion control

Previous research has shown a relationship between attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms and driving anger and adverse driving outcomes. Moreover, adults with ADHD symptoms express their emotions in more aggressive ways, indicating a lack of emotion control. The present study surveyed 246 college students to examine the relationship among ADHD symptoms, negative emotions, emotion control, and driving anger and safe driving behavior. Mediating effects of negative emotions and emotional control on the relationship between ADHD symptoms and self-reported driving anger and safe driving behavior were also examined. Both negative emotions and emotion control were significant mediators of the relationship between ADHD symptoms and driving anger, but not safe driving behavior. Mediation was stronger for ADHD-Hyperactive/Impulsive symptoms than for ADHD-Inattention symptoms. These results may provide some insight on how to design training programs for individuals with ADHD symptoms to increase driving safety.     

A bilateral advantage for maintaining objects in visual short term memory

Research has shown that attentional pre-cues can subsequently influence the transfer of information into visual short term memory (VSTM) (Schmidt, B., Vogel, E., Woodman, G., & Luck, S. (2002). Voluntary and automatic attentional control of visual working memory. Perception & Psychophysics, 64(5), 754–763). However, studies also suggest that those effects are constrained by the hemifield alignment of the pre-cues (Holt, J. L., & Delvenne, J.-F. (2014). A bilateral advantage in controlling access to visual short-term memory. Experimental Psychology, 61(2), 127–133), revealing better recall when distributed across hemifields relative to within a single hemifield (otherwise known as a bilateral field advantage). By manipulating the duration of the retention interval in a colour change detection task (1 s, 3 s), we investigated whether selective pre-cues can also influence how information is later maintained in VSTM. The results revealed that the pre-cues influenced the maintenance of the colours in VSTM, promoting consistent performance across retention intervals (Experiments 1 & 4). However, those effects were only shown when the pre-cues were directed to stimuli displayed across hemifields relative to stimuli within a single hemifield. Importantly, the results were not replicated when participants were required to memorise colours (Experiment 2) or locations (Experiment 3) in the absence of spatial pre-cues. Those findings strongly suggest that attentional pre-cues have a strong influence on both the transfer of information in VSTM and its subsequent maintenance, allowing bilateral items to better survive decay.     

Anxiety and sensitivity to eye gaze in emotional faces

This paper reports three studies in which stronger orienting to perceived eye gaze direction was revealed when observers viewed faces showing fearful or angry, compared with happy or neutral, emotional expressions. Gaze-related spatial cueing effects to laterally presented fearful faces and centrally presented angry faces were also modulated by the anxiety level of participants, with high- but not low-state anxious individuals revealing enhanced shifts of attention. In contrast, both high- and low-state anxious individuals demonstrated enhanced orienting to averted gaze when viewing laterally presented angry faces. These results provide novel evidence for the rapid integration of facial expression and gaze direction information, and for the regulation of gaze-cued attention by both the emotion conveyed in the perceived face and the degree of anxiety experienced by the observer.     

Attention and the multiple stages of multisensory integration: A review of audiovisual studies

Multisensory integration and crossmodal attention have a large impact on how we perceive the world. Therefore, it is important to know under what circumstances these processes take place and how they affect our performance. So far, no consensus has been reached on whether multisensory integration and crossmodal attention operate independently and whether they represent truly automatic processes. This review describes the constraints under which multisensory integration and crossmodal attention occur and in what brain areas these processes take place. Some studies suggest that multisensory integration and crossmodal attention take place in higher heteromodal brain areas, while others show the involvement of early sensory specific areas. Additionally, the current literature suggests that multisensory integration and attention interact depending on what processing level integration takes place. To shed light on this issue, different frameworks regarding the level at which multisensory interactions takes place are discussed. Finally, this review focuses on the question whether audiovisual interactions and crossmodal attention in particular are automatic processes. Recent studies suggest that this is not always the case. Overall, this review provides evidence for a parallel processing framework suggesting that both multisensory integration and attentional processes take place and can interact at multiple stages in the brain.     

Visual working memory and threat monitoring: Spider fearfuls show disorder-specific change detection

Previous studies of biased information processing in anxiety addressed biases of attention and memory, but little is known about the processes taking place between them: visual working memory (VWM) and monitoring of threat. We investigated these processes with a change detection paradigm. In Experiment 1, spider fearfuls (SF) and non-anxious controls (NAC) judged two subsequently presented displays as same or different. The displays consisted of several pictures, one of which could depict a spider. In Experiment 2, SF and NAC, both without snake fear, were tested with displays including either a spider or a snake image to determine the material-specificity of biased VWM. Both groups showed increased change detection for threat images. This effect was significantly stronger in SF, for spider images only, indicating a threat-specific VWM bias. Thus, contrary to the assumptions made by most cognitive models of anxiety, an explicit memory bias was found.