Endogenous and Exogenous Effects on a Driving-Simulation Task

The importance of how cognitive processes (Reasoning) influence on the understanding and the mental representation of road-side elements in form of the movement effects on the path driving must be studied in-depth. Literature shows that the key point to explain the influence of attention on movement is the meaning of the object being processed; literature also shows that the Reasoning with those cues we pay attention to has an effect on driving. By using a driving-simulation task, traffic signs have been tested on their effect on movement. Results show that the least-representative-of-their-meaning signs deviate participants´ movement path more intensively than the most-representative-of-their-meaning signs. Conclusions: Traffic accidents are well-known for their. The results here reported help to improve the cognitive Ergonomics of every road element, specially, traffic signs.

ABSTRACTA number of experimental results about the influence of attention on movement have been explained by theoretical models based on neuronal movement codification. These models have been recently questioned by findings that prove that the kind of influence on movement of the same attentional cue—with a supposedly similar neuronal codification—depends on their contextual significance. This research focused on this meaning dependency using endogenous cues that require a mental representation of directions, that is to say, representation of the way to take. To this end, obligation and prohibition traffic signs to indicate two possible route options during a tracking task were selected. The author found that participants tend to deviate from the direction of the movement mentally represented—an effect dubbed semantic repulsion.

A method to measure Representativity and Univocity of traffic signs and to test their effect on movement

Adults who are deaf have been shown to have better visual attentional orienting than those with typical hearing, especially when the target is located in the periphery of the visual field. However, most studies in this population have assessed exogenous visual attention orienting (bottom-up processing of external cues) rather than endogenous visual attention orienting (top-down processing of internal cues). We used a target detection task to assess both types of visual attention orienting. A modified cue-target paradigm was adopted to assess the facilitation effects of exogenous and endogenous cues during short and long inter-stimulus intervals (ISI), using a 2 (Group: deaf/typically hearing) * 2 (Location: central/peripheral) * 2 (Cue Type: exogenous/endogenous) mixed factorial design. ANOVAs showed that both exogenous cues and endogenous cues can facilitate deaf adults’ visual attentional orienting, and the facilitation effect of exogenous cues on attention orienting was significantly stronger for deaf participants than hearing participants. When the ISI was long, the effect was significantly stronger when the exogenous cue appeared in the periphery of the visual field. In the periphery, deaf adults benefited most from exogenous cues, whereas hearing adults benefited most from endogenous cues. The results suggest that not only exogenous cues but also endogenous cues can facilitate deaf adults’ visual attentional orienting. However, the effect of exogenous cues appears to be greater, especially when the stimulus appears in the peripheral visual field.

Endogenous versus exogenous attentional cuing effects on memory

Representativity and univocity of traffic signs and their effect on trajectory movement in a driving-simulation task: Regulatory signs

The SNARC (Spatial Numerical Association of Response Codes) effect, in that people respond faster with the left-hand side to small numbers and with the right-hand side to large numbers, had inspired intensive studies on spatial-numerical representation and its underlying mechanisms in recent years.Deheane et al. (1993) indicated that there is a mental number line in brain, in which the smaller number located in the left side and the larger number located in the right side.The spatial position of a number is activated automatically when a number was displayed.Attention plays the non-neglectable role in SNARC effect.Top-down and bottom-up driven processing are two important thinking ways.Bottom-up driven theory holds that the spacial characteristics of number are stable.Numerical and spacial information are activated simultaneously, yet top-down driven theory holds that number have no stable spacial characteristics and SNARC effect is output of subjective strategy control according to tasks.Concerning the role of attention in SNARC, majority studies have been focusing on the spatial characteristics of numbers, e.g.whether numbers can elicit attentional shifts automatically.Several studies have found that small numbers shift spacial attention to the left, while large numbers shift spacial attention to the right (Calabria & Rossetti, 2005; Fias et al., 2001; Fischer et al., 2003).In bottom-up driven processing, posterior parietal cortex (PPC) play a key role.But when participants were told to image a right-to-left ruler before response, the SNARC effect would disappeared or even reversed (Ristic et al., 2006).The prevailing view is that number can elicit attentional shifts, but under the mediation of top-down driven processing.However, new emerging evidence contributed to this topic from a completely new angle, e.g.how attentional cues, such as encoding of spatial locations, might activate numerical representations differently.Recently the studies from endogenous and exogenous paradigms in spa-

Both dorsal and ventral attention network nodes are implicated in exogenously driven visuospatial anticipation

Attentional selection is driven, in part, by a complex interplay between endogenous and exogenous cues. Recently, one's interactions with the physical world have also been shown to bias attention. Specifically, the sense of agency that arises when our actions cause predictable outcomes biases our attention toward those things which we control. We investigated how this agency-driven attentional bias interacts with simultaneously presented endogenous (words) and exogenous (color singletons) environmental cues. Participants controlled the movement of one object while others moved independently. In a subsequent search task, targets were either the previously controlled objects or not. Targets were also validly or invalidly cued. Both cue types influenced attention allocation. Endogenous cues and agency-driven attentional selection were independent and additive, indicating they are separable mechanisms of selection. In contrast, exogenous cues eliminated the effects of agency, indicating that perceptually salient environmental cues can override internally derived effects of agency. This is the first demonstration of a boundary condition on agency-driven selection.

Recent neuroimaging studies suggest that early sensory areas such as area V1 are recruited to actively maintain a selected feature of the item held in visual short-term memory (VSTM). These findings raise the possibility that visual attention operates in similar manners across perceptual and memory representations to a certain extent, despite memory-level and perception-level selections are functionally dissociable. If VSTM operates by retaining "reasonable copies" of scenes constructed during sensory processing (Serences et al., 2009, p. 207, the sensory recruitment hypothesis), then it is possible that selective attention can be guided by both exogenous (peripheral) and endogenous (central) cues during VSTM maintenance. Yet, the results from the previous studies that examined this issue are inconsistent. In the present study, we investigated whether attention can be directed to a specific item's location represented in VSTM with the exogenous cue in a well-controlled setting. The results from the four experiments suggest that, as observed with the endogenous cue, the exogenous cue can efficiently guide selective attention during VSTM maintenance. The finding is not only consistent with the sensory recruitment hypothesis but also validates the legitimacy of the exogenous cue use in past and future studies.

Crowding is a common visual phenomenon that can significantly impair the recognition of objects in peripheral vision. Two recent behavioral studies have revealed that both exogenous and endogenous attention can alleviate crowding, but exogenous attention seems to be more effective. The present study employed the event-related potential (ERP) technique to explore the electrophysiological characteristics of the influence of these two types of attention on crowding. In the experiment, participants were required to judge whether the letter "T" was upright or inverted, which may be preceded by an exogenous cue or an endogenous cue indicating the location of the target letter. The behavioral results showed that while exogenous cues reduced crowding in all stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs), endogenous attention took effects only in long SOA. The ERP results indicated that both endogenous and exogenous cues significantly alleviated the inhibition of visual crowding on the N1 component. However, the endogenous cue was effective only under long SOA, while the exogenous cue was effective only under short SOA conditions. In addition, invalid exogenous cues induced a larger P3 wave amplitude than valid ones in the short SOA condition, but endogenous attention did not show such a difference. These results indicate that both endogenous and exogenous attention can alleviate the effects of visual crowding, but they differ in effect size and temporal dynamics.

Exogenously cued attention triggers competitive selection of surfaces

We investigated the role of spatial probabilities in target location during participants' performance of a visual search task. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that spatial probabilities could serve as a powerful attentional bias that produced faster detection of targets in high-probability locations than of those in low- or random-probability locations. The effect could not be explained by repetition priming alone. Moreover, responses to targets in low-probability locations were slowed only when a distractor was present in the high-probability location. In Experiments 3-5, we compared the effects of spatial probability with an explicit endogenous cue and a salient exogenous cue. Facilitation due to spatial probability was independent of any benefit afforded by the explicit endogenous cue but interacted with the salient exogenous cue, such that the exogenous cue validity effect was compressed for targets in the high-probability location. Together, these results suggest that the spatial probabilities governing target location constitute a potent bias of visual processing and, as such, can be considered an attentional cue that differs from both typical explicit endogenous and salient exogenous cues.

Motion perception is a fundamental feature of the human visual system. As part of our daily life we often have to determine the direction of motion, even in ambiguous (AMB) situations. These situations force us to rely on exogenous cues, such as other environmental motion, and endogenous cues, such as our own actions, or previously learned experiences. In three experiments, we asked participants to report the direction of an AMB motion display, while manipulating exogenous and endogenous sources of information. Specifically, in all three experiments the exogenous information was represented by another motion cue while the endogenous cue was represented, respectively, by movement execution, movement planning, or a learned association about the motion display. Participants were consistently biased by less AMB motion cues in the environment when reporting the AMB target direction. In the absence of less AMB exogenous motion information, participants were biased by their motor movements and even the planning of such movements. However, when participants learned a specific association about the target motion, this acquired endogenous knowledge countered exogenous motion cues in biasing participants’ perception. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that we disambiguate AMB motion using different sources of exogenous and endogenous cues, and that learned associations may be particularly salient in countering the effects of environmental cues.

Effects of nicotine on visuo-spatial selective attention as indexed by event-related potentials