Brief mindfulness meditation intervention improves attentional control of athletes in virtual reality shooting competition: Evidence from fNIRS and eye tracking

Attentional control is a crucial cognitive ability for sports performance. The current research aimed to investigate whether a brief (20-min) pre-competition mindfulness meditation (MM) intervention enhances athletes' attentional control during competitions and alters the activity of brain regions related to attentional control. We created a virtual reality shooting competition to compare the eye-gaze indicators and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) parameters of 78 university athletes after 20 min of MM or 20 min of mind wandering (MW). Participants’ average fixation durations (AFDs) on task-relevant information (targets) were significantly longer in the MM group. In contrast, both average fixation counts (AFCs) and AFDs on task-irrelevant information (the ranking screen) were significantly lower in the MM group than in the MW group. Additionally, the MM group exhibited significantly stronger activation of the left and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) as well as higher levels of oxygenated haemoglobin [HbO] and greater functional connectivity (FC) of the right dlPFC, which was considered evidence of recruitment for attentional control. Moreover, the MM group achieved significantly better shooting performance than the MW group. Overall, the findings suggest that one session 20-min MM practice pre-competition facilitates focus during competition and improves athletic performance. We recommend the application of brief mindfulness practice in sports, especially in closed-skill sports that require high attention participation (e.g., shooting, archery, darts, golf, gymnastics, skating etc.).     

Bridging attentional control and reinvestment: A test of the interactionist hypothesis in an E-sport context

Attentional control and reinvestment are two competing mechanisms explaining why anxiety-provoking situations may undermine performance. To date, both perspectives have received empirical support, but neither of them perfectly explain how anxiety affects performance. In the present study, we examined a novel, interactionist hypothesis, that worry during task performance (i.e., a product of low attentional control) undermines performance to a greater extent when reinvestment (i.e., attempts to consciously control actions) is high compared to low, in an E-sport context. In a test of 84 experienced players in the Brawlhalla E-sport game, neither worry during the games nor reinvestment propensity on their own predicted ranked match performance, but the interaction between the two did. Specifically, players who were more worried during the ranked games (i.e., lower attentional control) tended to lose more games, of which the effect was evident only when movement-specific reinvestment was high, not low. However, decision-specific reinvestment did not moderate the effect of low attentional control on performance, nor predict performance on its own. Unlike movement-specific reinvestment, decision-specific reinvestment does not appear detrimental to E-sport performance. Overall, the findings provide the first evidence for the interactionist hypothesis of attentional control and reinvestment (especially movement-specific propensity), of which the interaction effect may be underpinned by availability of additional cognitive resources that assure adaptive task processing.     

Cumulative impact neglect in processing sequential changes

We demonstrate that decision contexts that involve sequential numerical changes over time can lead to suboptimal consumer choices in both incentivized and hypothetical studies. This is because, for such changes, an earlier outcome has a cumulative effect on the final total, which consumers tend to ignore. We document the prevalence of consumers' tendency to neglect this cumulative impact when processing sequential rent increases and price discounts as consumers focus on the naïve totals and trends formed by the consecutive price changes and choose economically inferior options. We propose a nudge that helps alert consumers about the cumulative effects and decrease their tendency to fall prey to this bias. We discuss the theoretical contributions as well as the implications for consumers, managers, and policymakers.     

Cognitive control and counterproductive oculomotor capture by reward-related stimuli

Two experiments investigated the extent to which value-modulated oculomotor capture is subject to top-down control. In these experiments, participants were never required to look at the reward-related stimuli; indeed, doing so was directly counterproductive because it caused omission of the reward that would otherwise have been obtained. In Experiment 1, participants were explicitly informed of this omission contingency. Nevertheless, they still showed counterproductive oculomotor capture by reward-related stimuli, suggesting that this effect is relatively immune to cognitive control. Experiment 2 more directly tested whether this capture is controllable by comparing the performance of participants who either had or had not been explicitly informed of the omission contingency. There was no evidence that value-modulated oculomotor capture differed between the two conditions, providing further evidence that this effect proceeds independently of cognitive control. Taken together, the results of the present research provide strong evidence for the automaticity and cognitive impenetrability of value-modulated attentional capture.     

Reward prospect interacts with trial-by-trial preparation for potential distraction

When attending for impending visual stimuli, cognitive systems prepare to identify relevant information while ignoring irrelevant, potentially distracting input. Recent work showed that a supramodal distracter-filtering mechanism is invoked in blocked designs involving expectation of possible distracter stimuli, although this entails a cost (distraction-filtering cost) on speeded performance when distracters are expected but not presented. Here we used an arrow-flanker task to study whether an analogous cost, potentially reflecting the recruitment of a specific distraction-filtering mechanism, occurs dynamically when potential distraction is cued trial-to-trial (cued distracter-expectation cost). In order to promote the maximal utilization of cue information by participants, in some experimental conditions the cue also signalled the possibility of earning a monetary reward for fast and accurate performance. This design also allowed us to investigate the interplay between anticipation for distracters and anticipation of reward, which is known to engender attentional preparation. Only in reward contexts did participants show a cued distracter-expectation cost, which was larger with higher reward prospect and when anticipation for both distracters and reward were manipulated trial-to-trial. Thus, these results indicate that reward prospect interacts with the distracter expectation during trial-by-trial preparatory processes for potential distraction. These findings highlight how reward guides cue-driven attentional preparation.     

Altering attentional control settings causes persistent biases of visual attention

Attentional control settings have an important role in guiding visual behaviour. Previous work within cognitive psychology has found that the deployment of general attentional control settings can be modulated by training. However, research has not yet established whether long-term modifications of one particular type of attentional control setting can be induced. To address this, we investigated persistent alterations to feature search mode, also known as an attentional bias, towards an arbitrary stimulus in healthy participants. Subjects were biased towards the colour green by an information sheet. Attentional bias was assessed using a change detection task. After an interval of either 1 or 2 weeks, participants were then retested on the same change detection task, tested on a different change detection task where colour was irrelevant, or were biased towards an alternative colour. One experiment included trials in which the distractor stimuli (but never the target stimuli) were green. The key finding was that green stimuli in the second task attracted attention, despite this impairing task performance. Furthermore, inducing a second attentional bias did not override the initial bias toward green objects. The attentional bias also persisted for at least two weeks. It is argued that this persistent attentional bias is mediated by a chronic change to participants’ attentional control settings, which is aided by long-term representations involving contextual cueing. We speculate that similar changes to attentional control settings and continuous cueing may relate to attentional biases observed in psychopathologies. Targeting these biases may be a productive approach to treatment.     

Salience-based progression of visual attention: Time course

In a visual search task, visual attention progresses from the most to the least salient item until a target is found. The time course of such salience-based progression remains unclear although the temporal deployment seems as crucial as the spatial deployment. The present study investigated how the general hierarchical pattern takes place. Healthy volunteers were presented with a primed visual search paradigm in which the primes consisted of three items differing in salience for either 33, 50 or 100 ms. Subsequently one of them became the target and participants had to make a judgment about it. In order to progress on the basis of salience, attention seemed first to be captured by the most salient item. Secondly, the first two most salient items seemed both encompassed within the attentional spotlight. At that time, the least salient item seemed inhibited, completing the stepwise progression of attention. In summary, our data suggest that the hierarchical pattern is built up over time through orienting and expansion of the spotlight, and inhibition of the least salient signals. Furthermore, complementary analyses revealed a proximity effect influencing the selection of the next location to visit. As predicted by different computational models, items located closely to the first visited location were more prone to attract attention than distant items but interestingly enough, this effect only applied to the least salient item suggesting a balance between salience and proximity criteria. Critically also, salience and proximity effects seem to have different time courses. Results are only partially explained by current visual attention models and require further investigation.     

Iconicity and the Emergence of Combinatorial Structure in Language

In language, recombination of a discrete set of meaningless building blocks forms an unlimited set of possible utterances. How such combinatorial structure emerged in the evolution of human language is increasingly being studied. It has been shown that it can emerge when languages culturally evolve and adapt to human cognitive biases. How the emergence of combinatorial structure interacts with the existence of holistic iconic form‐meaning mappings in a language is still unknown. The experiment presented in this paper studies the role of iconicity and human cognitive learning biases in the emergence of combinatorial structure in artificial whistled languages. Participants learned and reproduced whistled words for novel objects with the use of a slide whistle. Their reproductions were used as input for the next participant, to create transmission chains and simulate cultural transmission. Two conditions were studied: one in which the persistence of iconic form‐meaning mappings was possible and one in which this was experimentally made impossible. In both conditions, cultural transmission caused the whistled languages to become more learnable and more structured, but this process was slightly delayed in the first condition. Our findings help to gain insight into when and how words may lose their iconic origins when they become part of an organized linguistic system.     

Evolutionary debunking: Can moral realists explain the reliability of our moral judgments?

Evolutionary debunking arguments, notably Sharon Street’s Darwinian Dilemma (2006), allege that moral realists need to explain the reliability of our moral judgments, given their evolutionary sources. David Copp (2008) and David Enoch (2010) take up the challenge. I argue on empirical grounds that realists have not met the challenge and moreover cannot do so. The outcome is that there are empirically-motivated reasons for thinking moral realists cannot explain moral reliability, given our current empirical understanding.     

Attentional Processing of Letter Strings by Children

Reading a letter string requires attentional orienting toward the beginning of the string (left-dominant orientation), followed by orienting along the string. These attentional-orienting processes differ according to the lexicality of the letter string: Sequential processes apply when reading nonwords or pseudowords, while words can be processed more globally. The aim of this study was to evaluate the development of these attentional processes involved in reading. We conducted two experiments in 6- (first grade), 7- (second grade), and 9-year-old (fourth grade) children, using a procedure that required the detection of a letter (Experiment 1) or a nonletter (Experiment 2) target in a string of five characters. The target character could occur in the second (left) or fourth (right) position in the string. Results showed an advantage for left nonletter targets as early as age 6 and of left letter targets as early as age 7. In 6-year-olds, only good readers detected a left letter target faster than a right letter target; others detected a right letter target faster. Thus, dominant orienting toward the beginning of the letter string is not fully developed in children before the second year of reading. A possibility is that beginning readers have difficulties inhibiting an attention-orienting bias toward the right visual field in linguistic tasks. The results also showed that the lexicality effect on these attentional processes develops gradually until the fourth year of reading. We believe that the procedure used in this study will be very valuable for evaluating attentional difficulties during reading acquisition.