Attentional Distraction Research Articles

Dynamic versus Static Diagnostics

The presented article summarizes the importance of the dynamic diagnostic approach, which focuses on revealing the student's potential and his ability to develop through interaction with the examiner of the diagnostic battery. Dynamic diagnostics does not look only at the current level, but follows the process and change in the student's abilities and skills. Furthermore, it emphasizes the way in which the student comes to solving tasks and how his approach to them changes. It also takes into account the individual needs of the student, which can lead to a longer diagnostic process. Research has shown that students with ADHD/ADD have different performances in the test of distracted attention. We identified differences in their ability to internalize tasks in the speed and accuracy of work. This knowledge helps to better understand the individual needs of students and adapt the diagnostic process to support their learning and development.

Leveraging textured flickers: a leap toward practical, visually comfortable, and high-performance dry EEG code-VEP BCI

Reactive Brain-Computer Interfaces (rBCIs) typically rely on repetitive visual stimuli, which can strain the eyes and cause attentional distraction. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach rooted in visual neuroscience to design visual Stimuli for Augmented Response (StAR). The StAR stimuli consist of small, randomly-oriented Gabor or Ricker patches that optimize foveal neural response while reducing peripheral distraction.

Methods: In a factorial design study, 24 participants equipped with an 8-dry electrode EEG system focused on series of target flickers presented under three formats: traditional Plain flickers, Gabor-based, or Ricker-based flickers. These flickers were part of a five-class Code Visually Evoked Potentials (c-VEP) paradigm featuring low-frequency, short, and aperiodic visual flashes.

Results: Subjective ratings revealed that Gabor and Ricker stimuli were visually comfortable and nearly invisible in peripheral vision compared to plain flickers. Moreover, Gabor and Ricker-based textures achieved higher accuracy (93.6% and 96.3%, respectively) with only 88 seconds of calibration data, compared to plain flickers (65.6%). A follow-up online implementation of this experiment was conducted to validate our findings in naturalistic operations. During this trial, remarkable accuracies of 97.5% in a cued task and 94.3% in an asynchronous digicode task were achieved, with a mean decoding time as low as 1.68 seconds.

Conclusion: This work demonstrates the potential to expand BCI applications beyond the lab by integrating visually unobtrusive systems with gel-free, low-density EEG technology, thereby making BCIs more accessible and efficient. The datasets, algorithms, and BCI implementations are shared through open-access repositories.

Multi-Head Attention Affinity Diversity Sharing Network for Facial Expression Recognition

Facial expressions exhibit inherent similarities, variability, and complexity. In real-world scenarios, challenges such as partial occlusions, illumination changes, and individual differences further complicate the task of facial expression recognition (FER). To further improve the accuracy of FER, a Multi-head Attention Affinity and Diversity Sharing Network (MAADS) is proposed in this paper. MAADS comprises a Feature Discrimination Network (FDN), an Attention Distraction Network (ADN), and a Shared Fusion Network (SFN). To be specific, FDN first integrates attention weights into the objective function to capture the most discriminative features by using the proposed sparse affinity loss. Then, ADN employs multiple parallel attention networks to maximize diversity within spatial attention units and channel attention units, which guides the network to focus on distinct, non-overlapping facial regions. Finally, SFN deconstructs facial features into generic parts and unique parts, which allows the network to learn the distinctions between these features without having to relearn complete features from scratch. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, extensive experiments were conducted on several widely used in-the-wild datasets including RAF-DB, AffectNet-7, AffectNet-8, FERPlus, and SFEW. MAADS achieves the accuracy of 92.93%, 67.14%, 64.55%, 91.58%, and 62.41% on these datasets, respectively. The experimental results indicate that MAADS not only outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in recognition accuracy but also has a relatively low computational complexity.

Attention redirection transformer with semantic oriented learning for unbiased scene graph generation

Scene Graph Generation (SGG) plays an important role in scene understanding because all of the objects and relations in an image can be abstracted into a concise topological graph. Due to the complexity of visual scenes, including mutual occlusion between objects and semantic ambiguity, SGG is still a challenging task. Most of the existing models only focused on the context of a single object while contexts provided by paired objects are ignored. In this paper, we propose an Attention Redirection Transformer (ART) to extract pair-level contexts specifically, which is divided into an attention distraction stage and an attention integration stage. In this way, the attention of the model is forced to be redirected, which explores the implicit information in the background. In addition, to incorporate the semantic information of predicates, a Semantic Oriented Learning Module (SOL) is designed, which may assist in getting better textual semantics and also prompts cross-modal information fusion. At last, a self-diversity driven Dual Translation Embedding Module (DTM) is designed, which refines representations of subject and object and makes them distinct. Experimental results on the Visual Genome dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Moreover, our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the mR@K metric. The source codes are released on Github: https://github.com/Nora-Zhang98/ART-SOL.

Examining the Relationship and the Gender Differences between Re-Injury Worry, Confidence, and Attention after a Sport Musculoskeletal Injury.

Introduction: A sport injury is an unfortunate event that can significantly impact the injured athletes' psychology. There have been no studies examining gender differences in the psychological state after a sport-related musculoskeletal injury. Τhe aims of the current study were to (a) investigate the relationship between re-injury worry levels, confidence, and attention in the injured athletes who followed a rehabilitation program in order to return to competition, and (b) compare differences in these psychological factors between male and female athletes. Methods: A cross-sectional research design was used. A total of 60 athletes (30 men and 30 women) volunteered to participate, aged 25.50 ± 5.25 years old, all of whom had experienced a musculoskeletal injury within the past year. Three validated questionnaires, i.e., the Causes of Re-Injury Worry Questionnaire, the Sport Confidence Questionnaire of Rehabilitated Athletes Returning to Competition, and the Attention Questionnaire of Rehabilitated Athletes Returning to Competition, were completed by the participants on their first competitive game after their rehabilitation program. Results: All of the athletes experienced average levels of re-injury worry due to their opponents' ability and distraction attention, and high levels of confidence and functional attention. Many factors from the questionnaires were correlated with each other. Men experienced lower levels of re-injury worry due to rehabilitation compared to the women athletes (U = 329.00, p < 0.05), and women exhibited higher "Re-injury Worry due to Opponent's Ability" compared to the men athletes (U = 292.00, p < 0.01). Conclusions: A strong relationship was found between re-injury worry, confidence, and attention, with few gender differences. Since there is no previous research examining re-injury worry, confidence, and attention between men and women, future research with larger and more homogeneous samples is needed to confirm the present results.

Inattentional aftereffects: The role of attention on the strength of the motion aftereffect.

The way that attention affects the processing of visual information is one of the most intriguing fields in the study of visual perception. One way to examine this interaction is by studying the way perceptual aftereffects are modulated by attention. In the present study, we have manipulated attention during adaptation to translational motion generated by coherently moving random dots, in order to investigate the effect of the distraction of attention on the strength of the peripheral dynamic motion aftereffect (MAE). A foveal rapid serial visual presentation task (RSVP) of varying difficulty was introduced during the adaptation period while the adaptation and test stimuli were presented peripherally. Furthermore, to examine the interaction between the physical characteristics of the stimulus and attention, we have manipulated the motion coherence level of the adaptation stimuli. Our results suggested that the removal of attention through an irrelevant task modulated the MAE's magnitude moderately and that such an effect depends on the stimulus strength. We also showed that the MAE still persists with subthreshold and unattended stimuli, suggesting that perhaps attention is not required for the complete development of the MAE.

Preliminary development of a measure of parental behavioral responses to everyday pains in young children: the PREP.

Everyday pains are experienced frequently by young children. Parent responses shape how young children learn about and experience pain. However, research on everyday pains in toddlers and preschoolers is scarce, and no self-report measures of parent responses to their child's pain exist for this age group. The objective of this study was to develop a preliminary self-report measure of parent behavioral responses to everyday pains in the toddler and preschool years (the PREP) and examine its relationship with child age, sex, and parent and child distress. Items for the PREP were based on a behavioural checklist used in a past observational study of caregiver responses to toddler's everyday pains. Parents (N = 290; 93% mothers) of healthy children (47.9% boys) between 18 and 60 months (Mage = 34.98 months, SD = 11.88 months) completed an online survey of 46 initial PREP items, demographic characteristics, and their child's typical distress following everyday pains. An exploratory factor analysis was performed on the PREP items that describe observable actions parents may take in response to their young child's everyday pains. The final solution included 10 items across 3 factors: Distract, Physical Soothe, and Extra Attention and explained 60% of the model variance. All PREP subscales were related to child distress; only Physical Soothe and Extra Attention were related to parent distress. This study was a preliminary step in the development and testing of a new self-report measure of parental responses to everyday pains during early childhood.

The influence of cerebellum on visual selective attention in patients with multiple lacunar cerebral infarction and its neuromodulatory mechanisms.

This study aims to investigate the influence of the cerebellum on visual selective attention function and its neuromodulatory mechanism in patients with multiple lacunar cerebral infarction (MLCI). A retrospective analysis was conducted on 210 patients admitted with MLCI from January 2016 to May 2022. Analyzed the electrophysiological characteristics of the P3a and P3b components of vision in both groups, as well as source reconstruction simulations of dipole activation in the brains of the two groups, and analyzed the brain regions with differences in activation strength between the two groups. This study found that there was no significant difference in peak amplitude between the two groups, but compared with the control group, the peak latency of the case group was significantly prolonged. Specifically, the P3a peak latency induced by the novel stimulus was longer than that induced by the target stimulus P3b peak latency. Source reconstruction results showed decreased and increased activation in several brain regions in the case group compared to the control group. The study suggests that the impairment of distracted attention capture is more pronounced in patients with MLCI. The cerebellum indirectly influences the ventral and dorsal frontoparietal attention networks by modulating the levels of excitation and inhibition within the cerebral cortex of the attention network. This may represent a potential mechanism through which the cerebellum regulates visual selective attention information in MLCI patients.

Climatic disasters and distracted analysts

AbstractUsing a sample of 30,270 forecasts by 2,280 analysts under a stacked difference‐in‐differences framework involving 22 major climatic disasters in the United States, we examine the effect of climatic disasters on information production by security analysts, who play a crucial role in the financial market as information intermediaries. We find that earnings forecasts by analysts who experienced a major climatic disaster become less accurate than those by unaffected analysts within 3 months after the disaster, due to distracted attention. Disaster‐zone analysts are more likely to allocate their attention to firms of greater importance or salience, and they tend to reiterate their previous forecasts to maintain the quantity and timeliness of their forecasts. Overall, we document the real impact of cognitive bias on financial professionals' performance.

Onscreen presence of instructors in video lectures affects learners’ neural synchrony and visual attention during multimedia learning

COVID-19 forced students to rely on online learning using multimedia tools, and multimedia learning continues to impact education beyond the pandemic. In this study, we combined behavioral, eye-tracking, and neuroimaging paradigms to identify multimedia learning processes and outcomes. College students viewed four video lectures including slides with either an onscreen human instructor, an animated instructor, or no onscreen instructor. Brain activity was recorded via fMRI, visual attention was recorded via eye-tracking, and learning outcome was assessed via post-tests. Onscreen presence of instructor, compared with no instructor presence, resulted in superior post-test performance, less visual attention on the slide, more synchronized eye movements during learning, and higher neural synchronization in cortical networks associated with socio-emotional processing and working memory. Individual variation in cognitive and socio-emotional abilities and intersubject neural synchronization revealed different levels of cognitive and socio-emotional processing in different learning conditions. The instructor-present condition evoked increased synchronization, likely reflecting extra processing demands in attentional control, working memory engagement, and socio-emotional processing. Although human instructors and animated instructors led to comparable learning outcomes, the effects were due to the dynamic interplay of information processing vs. attentional distraction. These findings reflect a benefit-cost trade-off where multimedia learning outcome is enhanced only when the cognitive benefits motivated by the social presence of onscreen instructor outweigh the cognitive costs brought about by concurrent attentional distraction unrelated to learning.

Negative impact of attention distractors on the progress of the learning process from the perspective of a sample of primary school teachers in Laghouat Province

The study aimed to identify the impact of attention distractors on the classroom learning process from the perspective of a sample of primary school teachers in Laghouat Province. The descriptive exploratory method was used to align with the study's objectives. Furthermore, a questionnaire was developed regarding auditory and visual attentional distractors. The study concluded that the negative impact of attention distractors on the classroom learning process was significant, according to the opinions of the study sample.

Into the Gray Zone

Abstract “Into the Gray Zone” conducts a theoretical analysis of the complex inter-mediality of the choreographic exhibition. Examining the inherent tensions that arise as live dance-based practice enters visual arts institutions, this article examines audience attention, individual and collective spectatorship, artistic labor and value, technology, and the influence of social media. It argues that the inter-medial nature of the choreographic exhibition and its porosity to online platforms and mobile communication provides a more accurate reflection of the mediated environments we are currently surrounded by, and living within, than the black box theater. How can dance-based practice be implemented in this gray zone of highly individuated and distracted attention in ways that can make our contemporary condition visible? How can it potentially, if temporarily, remediate these environments?

Assessment of Temper Tantrum Behaviour in Preschool Children: A Descriptive Survey Approach

Objective: The purpose of the study is to assess parents’ experiences and associate demographic characteristics of parents and children with temper tantrum behavior characteristics of preschool children. Methods: A descriptive survey approach was used to conduct this study. A non-probability purposive sampling technique was adopted to recruit 121 parents of children aged between 3-6 years visiting a selected tertiary care hospital in India. All parents completed the parents’ experience of temper tan- trums in the children’s questionnaire. The analysis of results was carried out on IBM SPSS Software version 23.0. Results: A moderate level of temper tantrums showed on the mother’s age, education, occupation, marital status, program attendance, and medical and mental illness in the family, whereas a family’s monthly income above 50,000 indicated a severe level of temper tantrums, and half of the children ex- perienced tantrum behavior to get the attention of their parents, hungry and tired. The most frequently reported tantrum behavior was throwing things and hitting parents and siblings, and most tantrums occurred in public places and in vehicles. The majority of the parents adopted strategies to distract their child’s attention by helping the child talk about the causes of anger. A significant association was found between temper tantrum behavior and demographic characteristics of the marital status of parents (x2 = 15.340, p = 0.002) and the awareness program attended regarding temper tantrums in children (x2 = 4.491, p = 0.034). Conclusion: As temper tantrums peak in the toddler age group, the present study found that parental involvement is a necessity to manage temper tantrums in preschoolers as well. The main parent’s strategies to control the tantrum were distraction of child attention and helped them to talk about the causes of tantrum. Therefore, the study emphasizes the necessity of the involvement of parents and family members.

Application of transcranial alternating current stimulation to improve eSports-related cognitive performance.

Electronic Sports (eSports) is a popular and still emerging sport. Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) and First/Third Person Shooting Games (FPS/TPS) require excellent visual attention abilities. Visual attention involves specific frontal and parietal areas, and is associated with alpha coherence. Transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) is a principally suitable tool to improve cognitive functions by modulation of regional oscillatory cortical networks that alters regional and larger network connectivity. In this single-blinded crossover study, 27 healthy college students were recruited and exposed to 10 Hz tACS of the right frontoparietal network. Subjects conducted a Visual Spatial Attention Distraction task in three phases: T0 (pre-stimulation), T1 (during stimulation), T2 (after-stimulation), and an eSports performance task which contained three games ("Exact Aiming," "Flick Aiming," "Press Reaction") before and after stimulation. The results showed performance improvements in the "Exact Aiming" task and hint for a prevention of reaction time performance decline in the "Press Reaction" task in the real, as compared to the sham stimulation group. We also found a significant decrease of reaction time in the visual spatial attention distraction task at T1 compared to T0 in the real, but not sham intervention group. However, accuracy and inverse efficiency scores (IES) did not differ between intervention groups in this task. These results suggest that 10 Hz tACS over the right frontal and parietal cortex might improve eSports-related skill performance in specific tasks, and also improve visual attention in healthy students during stimulation. This tACS protocol is a potential tool to modulate neurocognitive performance involving tracking targets, and might be a foundation for the development of a new concept to enhance eSports performance. This will require however proof in real life scenarios, as well optimization.

Do natural disasters hinder analysts’ information production of non-affected firms?

This paper demonstrates that natural disasters increase analyst forecast bias on non-affected firms through attention distraction. The results hold in robustness checks, and the impact is enhanced in firms with worse information environment and analysts with poorer attention management capability.

The discreet wearing out of bodies and souls at work: Simone Weil on speed, humiliation and slow affliction.

The goals of this paper are twofold. First, the paper seeks to show the relevance of French philosopher Simone Weil’s writings on work for contemporary political and social theory. More specifically, by drawing on Weil’s “factory writings”—i.e. the diary she kept during the many months she spent working in factories, and the essays and letters that followed shortly after—the article shows that Weil’s analysis of speed, humiliation and affliction is highly pertinent for reflecting upon the consequences of the increasingly ubiquitous recourse to digital tracking and monitoring tools by today’s employers. Secondly, the paper proposes to read Weil’s account of degradation and affliction in light of the contemporary scholarship on “slow violence”. Inspired by Rob Nixon’s work, this scholarship is interested in forms of harm that are slow-paced, attritional, ‘out of sight’ and intimately tied to our (distracted) attention regimes. As I argue, Weil very lucidly described the paradox at the heart of many types of modern work: namely, that its fast pace causes the slow death of workers’ souls and bodies. Demonstrating the important resonances of Weil’s account of factory life and contemporary suffering in the era of digital surveillance, the paper underlines the significance of Weil’s account of affliction for understanding the depths of the harms caused by these forms of domination.

Defocused mode in depressed mood and its changes in time-frequency attention-related beta

Depressed mood has been proposed to possibly possess a unique mode of defocused attention. However, this argument needs to be supported by experimental evidence based on attentional performance. The present study used a perceptual load paradigm, combining factors of perceptual load, distractor-target compatibility, and eccentricity, to investigate the degree of attentional distraction in depressed mood. In addition, the mode of attentional distraction associated with depressed mood was explored with the time-frequency features of electroencephalography (EEG). The behavioral results showed that the high depressed mood (HD) group had significantly higher attentional distraction than the low depressed mood (LD) group. EEG results showed that 1) the beta power (especially beta-2, 18–30 Hz) of the two groups differed in the medio-late part of the attentional distraction, with significantly lower power in the HD group than in the LD group; 2) the results of the correlation between beta-2 power and depression scores revealed a significant negative correlation. These results imply that beta-2 is a potential marker that may be sensitive to depressed mood during attentional processing, which was further supported by the classification results of the support vector machine (SVM) with 80.65% accuracy between the HD and LD groups.

CTG-Net: an efficient cascaded framework driven by terminal guidance mechanism for dilated pancreatic duct segmentation

Pancreatic duct dilation indicates a high risk of various pancreatic diseases. Segmentation for dilated pancreatic duct (DPD) on computed tomography (CT) image shows the potential to assist the early diagnosis, surgical planning and prognosis. Because of the DPD’s tiny size, slender tubular structure and the surrounding distractions, most current researches on DPD segmentation achieve low accuracy and always have segmentation errors on the terminal DPD regions. To address these problems, we propose a cascaded terminal guidance network to efficiently improve the DPD segmentation performance. Firstly, a basic cascaded segmentation architecture is established to get the pancreas and coarse DPD segmentation, a DPD graph structure is build on the coarse DPD segmentation to locate the terminal DPD regions. Then, a terminal anatomy attention module is introduced for jointly learning the local intensity from the CT images, feature cues from the coarse DPD segmentation and global anatomy information from the designed pancreas anatomy-aware maps. Finally, a terminal distraction attention module which explicitly learns the distribution of the terminal distraction regions is proposed to reduce the false positive and false negative predictions. We also propose a new metric called tDice to measure the terminal segmentation accuracy for targets with tubular structures and two other metrics for segmentation error evaluation. We collect our dilated pancreatic duct segmentation dataset with 150 CT scans from patients with five types of pancreatic tumors. Experimental results on our dataset show that our proposed approach boosts DPD segmentation accuracy by nearly 20% compared with the existing results, and achieves more than 9% improvement for the terminal segmentation accuracy compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

‘Gonna get you, baby!’ A qualitative-empirical study of attentional modulation in reading a short story

How do individual readers determine where to allocate and how to modulate attention while reading a short story? To what extent are their attentional modulations influenced by textual characteristics and personal characteristics? This study uses response data from group discussions of the short story “Where are you going, where have you been?” by Joyce Carol Oates (1966). Participants read the story in advance, color-coding words or lines to indicate different modes of attention employed and annotated the text with text-related and unrelated mind-wandering thoughts. The results show how attentional allocation is driven by textual elements as well as readers’ choices, resulting in a complex interaction of elicited and volitional attention to certain elements of the text– not just focused or distracted attention, but a “modulated” and “integrated” experience that is dynamic and personal. These modulations are also impacted by contextual factors and the reader’s personal history that impact which aspects of a text are salient and how attention is directed. The results might provide an empirical basis for, but also challenge and supplement current theories of attentional modulation in reading literature.

Theta-band Connectivity within Cognitive Control Brain Networks Suggests Common Neural Mechanisms for Cognitive and Implicit Emotional Control.

Self-control is a core aspect of adaptive human behavior. It allows the attainment of personal goals by regulating unwanted thoughts, emotions, and behavior. Previous research highlighted the crucial role of cognitive control for explicitly pursued self-control and explicit emotion regulation strategies (such as cognitive reappraisal or attentional distraction). The present study investigated whether similar neural mechanisms would be involved in an implicit self-control task that acted as a covert emotion regulation strategy. Thirty-six female participants unscrambled sentences of either neutral (no-regulation condition) or neutral and self-control-related content (regulation condition; REG) before passively viewing negative and neutral pictures. Compared with the no-regulation condition, implicit induction of self-control reduced the amplitude of the late positive potential to negative pictures, indicating successful emotion downregulation. Crucially, implicit self-control enhanced connectivity within the two cognitive control brain networks in the theta frequency band. Specifically, for the frontoparietal network, increased connectivity from the dorsolateral PFC to the intraparietal cortex was observed. For the cingulo-opercular network, increased connectivity from dorsal anterior cingulate cortex to the left anterior insula/frontal operculum and from the right anterior insula/frontal operculum to the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex was observed. These effects were accompanied by a decrease in prestimulus alpha power in the right primary visual cortex, suggesting adjustment of attentional and perceptual processes in preparation for the upcoming affective stimulation. Together, our results indicate that self-control enhances cognitive control that is necessary for setting, maintaining, and monitoring the achievement of self-control behavior, as well as regulation of attentional and emotional processes.