Attention and action: The role of response mappings in auditory attention switching

Switching auditory attention incurs a performance decrement (i.e. auditory attention-switch costs). Using an auditory attention-switching paradigm, we aimed to generalise these across different response mappings. In all three experiments, two number words, spoken by a female and male speaker, were presented dichotically via headphones. A visual cue indicated the gender of the to-be-attended speaker in each trial. The task was a magnitude judgement of the relevant number word (i.e. smaller vs. larger than 5). We additionally varied the interval between cue onset and auditory stimulus onset (cue-stimulus interval) to explore cue-based preparatory effects. In Experiment 1, attention switching was more costly with direct-verbal responses (e.g. ‘smaller’) than in the shadowing task (e.g. ‘three’). In Experiment 2, performance was largely similar for direct-verbal responses and abstract-verbal responses (e.g. ‘left’). In Experiment 3, performance was generally worse with abstract-verbal responses than with abstract-manual responses (e.g. left key press) and auditory attention-switch costs were similar for both response mappings. Overall, auditory switch costs occurred more or less invariably across response mappings in categorical (magnitude) judgements suggesting a minor role of the response mapping in auditory attention switching. Furthermore, verbal identity-based judgements (i.e. shadowing) generally seem to benefit from ideomotor compatibility.     

Source Monitoring: ERP Evidence for Greater Reactivity to Nontarget Information in Older Adults

Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) were collected concurrently with stimulus presentation during a source monitoring task. Younger adults were less likely than older adults to make source monitoring errors and their ERP records showed far greater discrimination between target stimuli and familiar but nontarget foils. Older adults not only made more source errors but produced high amplitude late positivities to the nontarget foils even when these foils were correctly rejected. Under divided attention conditions, younger adults performance was similar to that of the older adults both behaviorally and electrophysiologically. These data illustrate the role that attentional resources play in the ability to inhibit response tendencies and suggest that age differences in source monitoring may be more related to attentional control than inefficiencies in the encoding of contextual information. As well, they suggest that the ERP late positivity may represent a more general response to item salience rather than serve as an index of recollection as is the current view.     

Auditory localisation of conventional and electric cars: Laboratory results and implications for cycling safety

When driven at low speeds, cars operating in electric mode have been found to be quieter than conventional cars. As a result, the auditory cues which pedestrians and cyclists use to assess the presence, proximity and location oncoming traffic may be reduced, posing a safety hazard. This laboratory study examined auditory localisation of conventional and electric cars including vehicle motion paths relevant for cycling activity. Participants (N = 65) in three age groups (16–18, 30–40 and 65–70 year old) indicated the location and movement direction (approaching versus receding) of cars driven at 15, 30 and 50 km/h in two ambient sound conditions (low and moderate). Results show that low speeds, higher ambient sound level and older age were associated with worse performance on the location and motion direction tasks. In addition, participants were less accurate at determining the location of electric and conventional car sounds emanating from directly behind the participant. Implications for cycling safety and proposals for adding extra artificial noise or warning sounds to quiet (electric) cars are discussed.     

Counterintuitive Religious Ideas and Metaphoric Thinking: An Event‐Related Brain Potential Study

It has been shown that counterintuitive ideas from mythological and religious texts are more acceptable than other (non‐religious) world knowledge violations. In the present experiment we explored whether this relates to the way they are interpreted (literal vs. metaphorical). Participants were presented with verification questions that referred to either the literal or a metaphorical meaning of the sentence previously read (counterintuitive religious, counterintuitive non‐religious and intuitive), in a block‐wise design. Both behavioral and electrophysiological results converged. At variance to the literal interpretation of the sentences, the induced metaphorical interpretation specifically facilitated the integration (N400 amplitude decrease) of religious counterintuitions, whereas the semantic processing of non‐religious counterintuitions was not affected by the interpretation mode. We suggest that religious ideas tend to operate like other instances of figurative language, such as metaphors, facilitating their acceptability despite their counterintuitive nature.     

Assessing emotional processing difficulties in normotensive individuals with high and isolated blood pressure elevations

This study examined the effect of sense modality (auditory/visual) on emotional dampening (reduced responsiveness to emotions with elevation in blood pressure). Fifty‐six normotensive participants were assessed on tasks requiring labelling and matching of emotions in faces and voices. Based on median split of systolic and diastolic blood pressures (SBP and DBP, respectively), participants were divided into low BP, high BP and isolated BP groups. On emotion‐labelling tasks, analysis revealed reduced emotion recognition in the high BP than the low BP group. On emotion‐matching tasks, reduced emotion recognition was noted in high and also isolated BP group as compared to low BP group for the task that required matching a visual target with one of the four auditory distractors. Our findings show for the first time that even isolated elevations in either SBP or DBP may result in emotional dampening. Furthermore, the study highlights that the emotional dampening effect generalises to explicit processing (labelling) of emotional information in both faces and voices—and that these effects tentatively occur during more pragmatic and covert (matching) emotion recognition processes too. These findings require replication in clinical hypertensives.     

Goal-directed aiming under restricted viewing conditions with confirmatory sensory feedback

A substantial body of research has examined the speed-accuracy tradeoff captured by Fitts’ law, demonstrating increases in movement time that occur as aiming tasks are made more difficult by decreasing target width and/or increasing the distance between targets. Yet, serial aiming movements guided by internal spatial representations, rather than by visual views of targets have not been examined in this manner, and the value of confirmatory feedback via different sensory modalities within this paradigm is unknown. Here we examined goal-directed serial aiming movements (tapping back and forth between two targets), wherein targets were visually unavailable during the task. However, confirmatory feedback (auditory, haptic, visual, and bimodal combinations of each) was delivered upon each target acquisition, in a counterbalanced, within-subjects design. Each participant performed the aiming task with their pointer finger, represented within an immersive virtual environment as a 1 cm white sphere, while wearing a head-mounted display. Despite visual target occlusion, movement times increased in accordance with Fitts’ law. Though Fitts’ law captured performance for each of the sensory feedback conditions, the slopes differed. The effect of increasing difficulty on movement times was least influential in the haptic condition, suggesting more efficient processing of confirmatory haptic feedback during aiming movements guided by internal spatial representations.     

Metacognitive scaffolding boosts cognitive and neural benefits following executive attention training in children

Interventions including social scaffolding and metacognitive strategies have been used in educational settings to promote cognition. In addition, increasing evidence shows that computerized process‐based training enhances cognitive skills. However, no prior studies have examined the effect of combining these two training strategies. The goal of this study was to test the combined effect of metacognitive scaffolding and computer‐based training of executive attention in a sample of typically developing preschoolers at the cognitive and brain levels. Compared to children in the regular training protocol and an untrained active control group, children in the metacognitive group showed larger gains on intelligence and significant increases on an electrophysiological index associated with conflict processing. Moreover, changes in the conflict‐related brain activity predicted gains in intelligence in the metacognitive scaffolding group. These results suggest that metacognitive scaffolding boosts the influence of process‐based training on cognitive efficiency and brain plasticity related to executive attention.     

Competition between rhythmic and linguistic meaning revisited: the effect of task demands

This paper revisits the conclusion of our previous work regarding the dominance of meaning in the competition between rhythmic parsing and linguistic parsing. We played five-note rhythm patterns in which each sound is a spoken word of a five-word sentence. We asked listeners to indicate the starting point of the rhythm while disregarding which word would normally be heard as the first word of the sentence. In four studies, we varied task demands by introducing differences in rhythm complexity, rhythm ambiguity, rhythm pairing, and semantic coherence. We found that task complexity affects the dominance of meaning. We therefore amend our previous conclusion: when processing resources are taxed, listeners do not always primarily attend to meaning; instead, they primarily attend to the aspect of the pattern (rhythm or meaning) that is more salient.     

Estimating group size from human speech: Three's a conversation,but four's a crowd

Much previous research has examined various aspects of auditory processing, including the localization of sounds, and the influence of lexical and indexical information on language processing. In the present set of experiments we explored the ability of listeners to estimate the number of speakers in a group solely from the information in an auditory signal. The bound on accurately estimating the number of simultaneous speakers is 3. We suggest that subitization—the ability to estimate numerosity of visual and auditory elements without explicitly counting these elements—rather than the capacity of short-term memory, may underlie this limitation. The cognitive constraint on estimating the number of simultaneous speakers may have implications for a wide variety of seemingly unrelated psychological phenomena.     

词语型类别属性归纳中分类与属性推理过程的时间特征

先前的研究中没有清晰分离类别属性归纳任务中分类过程与属性推理过程的ERP特征。本研究采用了事件相关电位技术(ERPs), 通过在词语型类别属性归纳任务的结论呈现阶段分开呈现结论类别和结论属性, 探讨了类别属性归纳中分类过程和属性推理过程的ERP特征。实验结果显示：在结论类别呈现阶段, 结论无关类别比结论关联类别诱发了更大的N400, 表明N400与类别属性归纳中的语义分类过程密切相关。在结论属性呈现阶段, 无论是在类别关联还是在类别无关条件下, 不一致属性比一致属性均诱发了更大的前部N2成分, 反映了属性知觉上的失匹配或规则的违背。随后, 在300~400 ms的时间窗口发现, 一致属性比不一致属性在前部脑区诱发了更大的类似于P3a的正偏转, 反映了对一致属性的更多关注。同时, 实验还发现, 当结论类别与前提类别关联时, 在300~400 ms的时间窗口, 一致属性比不一致属性在后部脑区也诱发了更大的类似于P3b的正偏转, 反映了推理预期的满意程度; 随后, 在400~600 ms的时间窗口, 不一致属性比一致属性在后部脑区诱发了更大的正偏转, 这与推理规则的违反相关。