Reward learning and attention in risky alcohol use: Absence of Pavlovian influences but altered response bias in high-risk drinkers.

Neural modulation of emotional-word processing during the attentional blink under varying T1 task demands: An ERP study.

In the emotional attentional blink (EAB; also termed emotion-induced blindness/EIB), a target in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream of fillers is difficult to report when it is preceded by a task-irrelevant emotional distractor. This is typically interpreted as capture of temporal attention by emotion. However, recent research has pointed out that many EAB tasks use emotional distractors that are visually distinct from other task stimuli, and that controlling for visual distinctiveness attenuates the EAB. This suggests that emotion alone is not a strong driver of the initial attentional capture in the EAB. The current study thus asked if this "emotional" blink is best understood as a salience-driven pop-out initiated by visual salience that is subsequently modulated by emotion. Using RSVP of images with unusually dense temporal sampling and factorial manipulations of critical distractor emotion and visual salience, the results support this account, and further suggest that the EAB can be characterized as two phases. Specifically, Phase 1 reflects visual salience, evidenced by an immediate but rapidly attenuating blink elicited by low emotion + high visual salience distractors. Phase 2 reflects emotional modulation, evidenced by a longer-latency and weaker blink elicited by high emotion + low visual salience distractors. High emotion + high visual salience distractors highlighted both phases: an immediate blink, presumably from visual salience, that continued into later lags. These results yield a mechanistic understanding of how emotion and visual salience interact to drive visual attention in rapidly-changing environments.

Audiovisual attentional blink in restrained eaters: Modulation by sound and DLPFC tDCS.

A topic of interest in the attention capture literature is the interaction between attention and conscious perception. Many studies have examined whether conscious perception of an irrelevant distracting stimulus is necessary for it to capture attention. One approach involves using measures that require subjects to rate their perceived clarity of a distractor on every trial. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the assessment of conscious perception of the distractor using such measures impacts the allocation of attention to the distractor. We investigated whether measuring conscious perception of a distractor increases its relevance to the observer, causing attention to be allocated to the distractor voluntarily rather than captured involuntarily. We examined this possibility in four experiments in which subjects completed a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) task. To determine whether attention is allocated voluntarily to the distractor or captured by it, we measured two effects indicative of attention capture, the contingent capture effect and a spatial distance effect. The results suggest that when conscious perception was measured distractors captured attention irrespective of whether the distractor and target colour matched. However, when conscious perception was not being measured a robust contingent capture effect was consistently observed. Although the effect of the spatial distance manipulation was mixed, we consistently observed a larger attentional blink by target-matching distractors presented at a location far from the focally attended region when conscious perception was measured than when it was not. Thus, we concluded that measuring conscious perception of a distractor interferes with the allocation of attention to the distractor by causing it to be voluntarily attended as though it were task relevant, masking the hallmarks observed when attention is captured. The present findings suggest that previous claims made about the interaction between conscious perception and attention may be premature, necessitating either development of a new measure, or adjustments to existing measures.

Does crossmodal attentional blink depend on spatial congruency?

Cerebellar Contribution to Rapid Cross‐Modal Attentional Shift in Visual‐Tactile Processing

Attentional selectivity focuses on what is currently relevant. Relevance changes frequently in everyday life, triggering rapid reassignments of attentional priorities. Such reassignments are often not associated with behavioral changes and are thus difficult to assess objectively. Here, we measured rapid, covert switches between preparatory task settings (attentional templates) in visual search, as they occurred in real time. Participants searched for color-defined targets in search displays that appeared unpredictably either early (after 700 msec) or late (after 1500 msec) on each trial. In Experiment 1, early and late targets were defined by different colors. Participants first had to activate a template for the early target color and then switch to a template for the late target color if no early search display appeared. In Experiment 2, cues signaled whether the initial target template had to be maintained or changed. Template activation states were tracked with N2pc components to rapid sequences of irrelevant probes matching either the early or late target color. A template for the early target color was active from about 300 msec before the expected arrival of early search displays, followed by a template switch. Switches based on endogenous temporal expectations emerged more gradually in time than switches in response to external cues. Presenting cues in Experiment 2 triggered a temporary search template deactivation even when the target color remained unchanged, indicating that template maintenance is subject to an attentional blink. Results demonstrate that rapid switches between attentional templates in visual search can be tracked with high temporal precision.

ABSTRACT Experimental evidence consistently demonstrates older adults often perform worse than younger adults across various cognitive domains. Prior studies reported that older adults with high lifetime stress perform worse on working memory and inhibitory tasks than both younger individuals and older adults with low stress. Notably, low-stress older adults performas well as younger adults, indicating that life-time cumulative stress, rather than age alone, may drive some cognitive decline during aging. However, this stress-age affect on attention, the underlying process of both working memory and inhibition is yet to be investigated. In this within-subjects cross-sectional online study 141 participants (n = 85 under 30 and n = 56 over 60) identified two target words in an Attentional Blink task. Participants also reported their lifetime and perceived stress and their state anxiety. Using linear mixed models and Bayes Factors, we provide evidence that age and lifetime stress predict overall attentional performance on the Attentional Blink task. This supports the hypothesis that older high life-time stress participants would score lower on the attentional task compared to older low-stress participants and younger participants. Due to the interconnected nature of attention, these results suggest the stress-age interaction could be a factor in other cognitive domains that are susceptible to age-related decline. On a positive note, the results also suggest that attentional decline during aging, like impairments in working memory and inhibition, may be exacerbated by factors outside of simply getting older (here, elevated lifetime exposure to stress) and may therefore, not be inevitable.

Social identity threat (SIT) is a situational stressor that increases arousal and negative affect, biases memory encoding towards domain-specific negative affect, and impairs women’s performance in contexts where they are outnumbered by men. One consequence of these effects could be that women develop learned aversions towards stigmatized domains in Science, Technology, Engineering or Mathematics (STEM). Four studies tested whether stereotypic STEM images (STEMIs) prompt aversive-like responses that predict SIT-like outcomes, including underperformance in SIT contexts and more negative SIT-oriented memories over time. Using a dot-probe paradigm, Study 1 found that only SIT women exhibited greater arousal responses to STEMIs compared to stereotypic non-STEM images (NonSTEMIs), perceived STEMIs as more negatively arousing compared to men, and underperformed; men in this context showed a similar arousal response to STEMIs and NonSTEMIs and performed better. Study 2 replicated this effect among women in STEM majors and linked aversive responses to more negative affect laden memories for the STEM lab experience five weeks later. Using EEG, Study 3 found that enhanced processing of STEMIs presented during an attentional blink task (indexed via increased communication between occipital and prefrontal cortical regions) predicted underperformance on a math test among SIT women but marginally better performance among men. Study 4 mitigated SIT underperformance effects among women utilizing a dot-probe training paradigm that blunted arousal responses to STEMIs; instructing men to attend to STEMIs facilitated their performance. STEM aversions may thus facilitate SIT-like effects, possibly defining what the “threat” in SIT is, however, blunting aversions may attenuate these effects when women work alongside men in STEM performance situations.

In the first months postterm, human infants are traditionally viewed as passive to their environment, unable to focus or sustain attention on specific objects. Here, we asked whether 4-mo-old infants could engage their attention strongly enough in a visual task to block the perception of a subsequent interesting stimulus-a phenomenon known as attentional blink, which in adults reflects a serial processing bottleneck for accessing a central workspace. We presented three successive visual events: a central teddy bear (T1) followed by a lateralized face and scrambled face (T2) at varying stimulus onset asynchrony (SOAs: 400, 800, and 1,200 ms), then the same face reappeared after 1,600 ms (T3). We monitored saccades toward the face, pupil size, and electroencephalic (EEG) responses to the flickering background. Our behavioral and EEG results showed that infants missed the lateralized face at the shortest SOA (400 ms). At 800 ms, detection occurred only when the face appeared in the left hemifield, while detection in the right hemifield required 1,200 ms, suggesting a hemispheric asymmetry in face processing. Furthermore, at SOAs where T2 should be visible, a trial-by-trial metric based on event-related variability revealed that the depth of attentional engagement to T1 predicted access to T2, despite identical visual input. These findings support the presence of a global workspace in early infancy, though with slower dynamics.

Direct evidence of inter-target response competition for limited resources in attentional blink.

The attentional blink (AB) refers to impaired processing of a second target (T2) when presented 200-500 msec after a first target (T1) in a rapid serial visual presentation stream. There is converging evidence that alpha oscillations (8-12 Hz) may be critical for AB performance, as they can regulate attentional control and suppress distractor interference. This study investigated the effects of neuromodulation of alpha activities via transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) on AB. Alpha tACS may either reduce the AB magnitude at intermediate lags by modulating inhibitory control (the suppression hypothesis) or improve AB task performance across the lags by reducing overinvestment of attentional resources on T1 and distractor processing (the diffuse attention hypothesis). In Experiment 1, alpha tACS applied over the right dorsolateral pFC (rDLPFC) during an AB task increased T2|T1 accuracy independent of the T2 lags. In Experiment 2, in-phase tACS over the rDLPFC and parietal cortex produced higher T2|T1 accuracy than antiphase tACS, again independent of T2 lag. These behavioral effects may result from alpha-tACS-induced diffuse attentional state that minimizes distractor interference of AB. The present study offers insights into the neural mechanisms underlying temporal attention and further highlights the potential utility of the neuromodulation method.

Temporal dynamics of competition in global/local attentional selection.

How quickly we attend to objects plays an important role in navigating the world, especially in dynamic and rapidly changing environments. Measuring individual differences in attention speed is therefore an important, yet challenging, task. Although reaction times in visual search tasks have often been used as an intuitive proxy of such individual differences, these measures are limited by inconsistent levels of reliability and contamination by non-attentional factors. This study introduces the rate of post-target distractor intrusions (DI) in the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm as an alternative method of studying individual differences in the speed of attention. In RSVP, a target is presented for a brief duration and embedded among multiple distractors. DIs are reports of a subsequent distractor rather than the target and have previously been shown to be associated with the speed of attention. The present study explored the reliability and validity of DI rates as a measure of individual differences. In three studies, DI rates showed high internal consistency and test–retest reliability over a year (>.90), even with a short task administration of only about 5 minutes. Moreover, DI rates were associated with measures related to attention speed, but not with unrelated measures of attentional control, reading speed, and attentional blink effects. Taken together, DI rates can serve as a useful tool for research into individual differences in the speed of attention. Links to a downloadable and easily executable DI experiment, as well as a brief discussion of methodological considerations, are provided to facilitate such future research.

Food cues that appear in the visual field capture our attention easily and can influence eating behavior. The current study investigated the influence of food-related stimuli on visual attention, considering the macronutrient composition of food items. Images representing sweet and savory foods were employed, the latter consisting primarily of high-protein foods. The participants were primed with these images prior to performing the attentional task. We found that both sets of food images elicited an emotional attentional blink (EAB), but a stronger EAB was observed for the high-protein foods, and this observation was further supported by a negative correlation between the attentional bias (ABias) and the proportion of protein consumed by the participants before the experiment, with participants who consumed less protein exhibiting a stronger ABias toward high-protein foods. These findings suggest that an ABias might also arise to facilitate the consumption of high-protein foods when prior consumption of this macronutrient is low.

In rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) tasks, fearful faces are detected more readily than neutral faces, but it remains unclear whether this pattern extends to happy faces or whether the task difficulty of the first target (T1) modulates these fear and happiness superiority effects. This study investigated how T1 difficulty (an alphabetic search task) influenced the attentional blink (AB) for T2, which involved identifying emotional faces (fearful, happy, and neutral) in an emotion classification task. Forty-one college students from Xinxiang Medical University completed the RSVP task, and their behavioral and ERP data were recorded and analyzed. Behavioral results revealed that during the AB period, fearful and happy faces were detected with significantly higher accuracy than neutral faces under low T1 difficulty conditions, while fearful faces outperformed both happy and neutral faces under high T1 difficulty. ERP data showed that fearful faces (compared with neutral faces) elicited significantly more positive VPP and P3b amplitudes, whereas happy faces (compared with neutral faces) triggered significantly more negative N170 and more positive P3b amplitudes. Additionally, happy faces evoked more positive P3a amplitudes than neutral faces under low and medium T1 difficulty conditions, while fearful faces elicited more positive P3a amplitudes only under low difficulty conditions. These findings demonstrate that T1 task difficulty moderates the superiority of fearful and happy faces during the AB period, with fearful faces being detected more easily and earlier than happy and neutral faces, providing new insights into the temporal dynamics of emotional face processing under varying cognitive demands.

Attention regulation is a core mechanism of mindfulness meditation and has been proposed to underlie many of its health-related benefits. Here, we review and synthesize behavioral findings on attentional outcomes in long-term meditators, integrating neurocognitive evidence within a meditative development framework. Key findings indicate trait-level improvements across attentional functions-executive attention, sustained attention, hierarchical and general orienting-and attentional phenomena, such as the attentional blink. Preliminary evidence also identifies trait enhancements in response inhibition, alertness, and reduced mind-wandering. Interaction effects were found for response inhibition, sustained attention, reduced mind-wandering, and alertness, with alertness benefiting most strongly from long-term and intensive acute practice. As expected, attention-based outperformed non-attention-based techniques, while observe-and-release techniques facilitated attentional orienting and detection of closely spaced or unexpected stimuli during sustained attention tasks. These findings suggest that long-term meditation may enhance attention regulation in accordance with training specificity principles; the cognitive functions most directly targeted are the most likely to improve. Nevertheless, broader findings indicate that meditative development may depend on the balanced cultivation of multiple faculties over time, highlighting the non-linear and multidimensional nature of long-term meditative change. Consistent with traditional goals of cultivating mental faculties, the present findings may reflect attentional adaptations that support the development of advanced meditative states. Despite considerable consistency in empirical results, methodological limitations-including heterogeneous study designs and insufficient differentiation between states and traits-complicate interpretations. Future research should prioritize operationalizing and measuring contemplative constructs within integrative frameworks and using rigorous factorial designs to clarify state-trait interactions and meditation predictors.

Development and validation of implicit behavioral tests assessing perceptual sensitivity to construction hazards.

The present experiments measure a form of preparatory control over selective attention in a two-target task. We used a skeletal two-target method in which the first of two target words (T1) is presented with or without an accompanying distractor word. When T1 is displayed with a distractor, a stark identification deficit (an attentional blink) is produced for the second target word (T2). In our adaptation of this method, we inserted a stimulus immediately prior to each two-target trial to measure sequence effects on selective attention to T1, and the resulting two-target cost for T2. Generally speaking, neither T1 nor T2 identification were influenced by the stimulus/response features of the event that preceded T1. However, both T1 and T2 identification were influenced by the task instructions for the event that preceded T1. These results point to a strong contribution of preparatory state on selective attention in a two-target task.