Shifts Of Attention Research Articles

Caregiver Engagement in Serious Illness Communication in a Long-Term Acute Care Hospital Setting.

Prolonged management of critical illnesses in long-term acute care hospitals (LTACH) makes serious illness communication (SIC), a clinical imperative. SIC in LTACH is challenging as clinicians often lack training and patients are typically unable to participate-making caregivers central. This qualitative descriptive study characterized caregiver engagement in SIC encounters, while considering influencing factors, following the implementation of Ariadne Labs' SIC training at a LTACH in the Northeastern United States. Clinicians' documented SIC notes (2019-2020) were analyzed using directed content analysis. Codes were grouped into four categories generated from two factors that influence SIC-evidence of prognostic understanding (yes/no) and documented preferences (yes/no)-and caregiver engagement themes identified within each category. Across 125 patient cases, 251 SIC notes were analyzed. In the presence of prognostic understanding and documented preferences, caregivers acted as upholders of patients' wishes (29%). With prognostic understanding but undocumented preferences, caregivers were postponers of healthcare decision-making (34%). When lacking prognostic understanding but having documented preferences, caregivers tended to be searchers, intent on identifying continued treatment options (13%). With poor prognostic understanding and undocumented preferences, caregivers were strugglers, having difficulty with the clinicians or family unit over healthcare decision-making (21%). The findings suggest that two factors-prognostic understanding and documented preferences-are critical factors clinicians can leverage in tailoring SIC to meet caregivers' SIC needs in the LTACH setting. Such strategies shift attention away from SIC content alone toward factors that influence caregivers' ability to meaningfully engage in SIC to advance healthcare decision-making.

Postural control in emotional states: An effect of biofeedback

BackgroundEmotional states in the short term and affective impairments, such as anxiety and depression in the long run, can have a significant impact on postural control. Individuals with these conditions often struggle with maintaining balance during emotionally charged situations, which can increase their risk of falls and injuries. Biofeedback has been proposed as a potential intervention to improve postural control during emotional induction. Research questionHow do emotional stimuli affect postural control performance in the presence of real-time postural feedback? MethodsForty-two participants took part in the study. The visual stimuli used in the experiment to induce emotions of various valence in the subjects were video clips, containing a series of pictures (24 positive, 24 neutral and 24 negative pictures). During the experiment, participants were required to maintain balance standing on a force platform while watching the videos on a computer screen. For each subject, three sessions of 480 s were generated, each of which included two conditions: with and without biofeedback (a target on the screen indicating the subject’s position relative to the center of pressure (CoP). ResultsThe No Feedback condition provoked a higher medial-lateral and anterior-posterior sway, but lower velocity of CoP than the Feedback condition. We did not find any effect of the valence of emotional videos on indicators of postural control in No Feedback condition. However, both negative and positive videos provoked a lower velocity of CoP in comparison to neutral videos in the Feedback condition. SignificanceChanges observed in postural control during the Feedback condition in the presence of emotional stimuli (both negative and positive) could be explained by the shift in attention from the task of maintaining posture to the emotional videos. The results of this study have important implications for clinicians involved in postural training and rehabilitation.

PKD‐Net: Distillation of prior knowledge for image completion by multi‐level semantic attention

SummaryPrior knowledge plays a crucial role in image completion. Although almost all of the existing image completion methods use prior knowledge to complete the image to be repaired from different perspectives, the learning and modeling of the prior knowledge is still a challenging problem. In order to address this issue, we propose a novel prior knowledge distillation framework (PKD‐Net) which could distill prior knowledge of structure and style from multiple semantic space and generates not only plausible content but also consistent style with surrounding image area. Our PKD‐Net replaces the skip connection in the vanilla U‐Net with a semantic shift attention module. The semantic shift attention module takes features from encoder layer and those from decoder layer as input pairs to output shifted features which take into account the long‐range dependency of encoder layer features and corresponding decoder layer features from the perspective of local structure and style. Semantic shift attention module models the global interdependencies in local spatial structures (patches centered at each position) and style (appearance texture) dimensions respectively, which could implement distillation of prior knowledge from two aspects: structure and style. Experiments on multiple datasets including faces (CelebA, CelebA‐HQ) and natural images (ImageNet, Places2, Paris Street View) demonstrate that our proposed approach generates higher quality completion results than existing ones.

Managing “the shapeless mass” in the digital age

In his 1927 “Archeion” article, On issues of modern Polish archival science (Z zagadnień nowożytnej archiwistyki polskiej), the renowned Polish archivist Kazimierz Konarski wrote of the challenge of managing the “shapeless mass” of modern archives in the 20th century. In this presentation, Canadian archival consultant and independent scholar Laura Millar examines the records and archives management challenge of the 21st century: managing the “shapeless mass” of electronic records inundating governments and organizations in the digital age. The “flood” of physical and textual documentation that Dr. K. Konarski faced a century ago has become a torrent of invisible, omnipresent, elusive electronic records – photographs, audio recordings, databases, AI-generated data, and more – stored in countless computer hard drives, cloud storage systems, and personal digital devices. How can the archivist manage digital sources that are both ephemeral and eternal at the same time? To ensure society has the documentary evidence it needs, L. Millar argues that archivists must our shift attention away from the care of static, “old” archives and focus more directly on the work of capturing and recording the present. The digital age may transform our methods, but our mission remains the same: to help society capture, protect, and make available for use essential sources of documentary proof.

Revisiting the elaboration likelihood model in the context of a virtual influencer: A comparison between high‐ and low‐involvement products

AbstractWhile existing research on the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) has primarily focused on human influencers, the literature on virtual influencers (also known as digital humans or AI influencers) remains limited. To address this research gap, this study investigates the factors influencing consumer attitudes toward ads promoted by virtual influencers. Extending the ELM framework, we examine perceived expertise and attractiveness as antecedents, and explore consumer online‐to‐offline dynamics as consequences. Using a multigroup structural equation model, the study compares high‐ and low‐involvement product ads by analyzing questionnaires (n = 406). A novelty lies in our findings that, contrary to existing ELM research, perceived attractiveness significantly influences attitudes toward the ads across both high‐ and low‐involvement levels. We attribute this result to a shift of consumer attention towards virtual influencers, driven by their attention‐grabbing aesthetic appeals. Our study extends the ELM framework and contributes to the literature on digital marketing, advertising, and human‐computer interaction.

Dynamic alpha power modulations and slow negative potentials track natural shifts of spatio-temporal attention.

Alpha power modulations and slow negative potentials have previously been associated with anticipatory processes in spatial and temporal top-down attention. In typical experimental designs, however, neural responses triggered by transient stimulus onsets can interfere with attention-driven activity patterns and our interpretation of such. Here, we investigated these signatures of spatio-temporal attention in a dynamic paradigm free from potentially confounding stimulus-driven activity using electroencephalography. Participants attended the cued side of a bilateral stimulus rotation and mentally counted how often one of two remembered sample orientations (i.e., the target) was displayed while ignoring the uncued side and non-target orientation. Afterwards, participants performed a delayed match-to-sample task, in which they indicated if the orientation of a probe stimulus matched the corresponding sample orientation (previously target or non-target). We observed dynamic alpha power reductions and slow negative waves around task-relevant points in space and time (i.e., onset of the target orientation in the cued hemifield) over posterior electrodes contralateral to the locus of attention. In contrast to static alpha power lateralization, these dynamic signatures correlated with subsequent memory performance (primarily detriments for matching probes of the non-target orientation), suggesting a preferential allocation of attention to task-relevant locations and time points at the expense of reduced resources and impaired performance for information outside the current focus of attention. Our findings suggest that humans can naturally and dynamically focus their attention at relevant points in space and time and that such spatio-temporal attention shifts can be reflected by dynamic alpha power modulations and slow negative potentials.

Psychopathy and gaze cueing

Background and objectivesPsychopathic traits – and especially callous affective features – have been linked to altered processing of others’ emotional expressions, and to reduced attention to the eyes. Despite the importance of gaze cueing (i.e., the tendency to orient attention toward where someone else is looking) for social functioning, few studies have investigated relationships between psychopathic traits and gaze cueing, and whether facial emotional expression influence these relationships, obtaining mixed results. To address this gap, the present study aimed to evaluate associations between psychopathic traits and gaze cueing for emotional and neutral expressions. Methods65 non-clinical male participants (Mage = 27.3 years) completed two self-report measures of psychopathy and performed laboratory tasks to assess gaze-cueing for emotional vs. neutral faces and an arrow-cueing task as a comparison. ResultsLinear mixed models showed no significant associations of emotional (versus neutral) expressions, or psychopathy trait dimensions, with either gaze cueing or arrow cueing. LimitationsReliance on a convenience sample of non-clinical men, assessed with self-reports measures of psychopathy, and using static emotional stimuli limit the generalizability of our findings. ConclusionsFindings suggest that psychopathic traits are not associated with individual differences in following others’ gaze to direct attention, and that there was no advantage for affective relative to neutral expressions.

A lateralized alpha-band marker of the interference of exogenous attention over endogenous attention.

Scientists differentiate top-down from bottom-up visuospatial attention processes. While bottom-up attention is rapidly engaged by emerging demands from the environment, top-down attention in contrast reflects slow voluntary shifts of spatial attention. Several lines of research substantiate the idea that top-down and bottom-up attentional processes involve distinct functional systems. An increasing number of studies, however, argue that both attention systems share brain processing resources. The current study examines how salient visual events that engage bottom-up processes interfere with top-down attentional processes. Using neurophysiological recordings and multivariate pattern classification techniques, the authors show that these patterns of interference occur within the alpha-band of neural activity (8-12Hz), which implies that bottom-up and top-down attention processes share this narrow-band frequency brain resource. The results further demonstrate that patterns of alpha-band activity explains, in part, the interference between top-down and bottom-up attention at the behavioral level.

The manipulative essence of visual media: from man-made images to generative deepfakes

The paper explores the problems of manipulation and reliability of information in the visual media. Manipulation is part of their essence. Distortions in the message arise from a shift in attention from reality as such to how it’s seen by others or who and how it’s represented. The objective vision is replaced by a presentation of the vision of others in visual media. This opens up the possibility of manipulation and becomes the reason for the creation of visual falsifications. Modernity has become the era of post-truth. Visual media are increasingly shifting towards total falsification with the development of digital technologies, artificial intelligence. The generated image turns out to be more real and reliable than reality itself. This paper uses the classification of visual media images based on how they are created. An attempt is made to identify the causes of distortions in the representation of reality at different stages of the development of visual media. The article analyzes how the technologies of creating visual images affect the development of manipulative and falsifying practices that undermine the credibility of the visual message.

Associations between neighborhood environment and computerized cognitive performance among older Black adults

AbstractBackgroundStudies have suggested that neighborhood quality is associated with health outcomes beyond individuals’ socioeconomic characteristics (Kind & Buckingham, 2018; Ludwig et al., 2011). Limited research has explored how subjective neighborhood quality is associated with cognitive functioning, particularly among socioeconomically diverse Black adults. The current study examined the cross‐sectional association between perceived neighborhood characteristics and cognitive functioning among Black adults.MethodThis study included 1,079 community‐dwelling, socioeconomically diverse Black adults (Mage = 56.64, SDage = 9.14; 59% female) from wave 4 of the Healthy Aging in Neighborhoods of Diversity across the Life Span (HANDLS) study. Neighborhood quality was assessed using three scales about built environment disorder (e.g., litter, graffiti, and crime), social cohesion (e.g., close‐knit neighborhood, neighbors can be trusted), and social control (e.g., neighbors take action for children disrespecting adults). Cognitive functioning was assessed using the computerized Joggle battery. Multivariable linear regression analyses were conducted with each cognitive measure as the outcome measure. Models were adjusted for age, sex, education, reading literacy, poverty status, and depressive symptoms.ResultIn the adjusted models, higher built environment disorder was associated with slower performance (p < .05) on an attention and visual orientation measure and fewer correct responses (p’s < .05) on attention, executive function, and speed measures. High social cohesion was associated with faster performance (p < .05) on attention, visual orientation, executive function, and speed measures. Additionally, high social cohesion was associated with greater numbers of correct responses (p < .05) on an attention and executive function measure. Interestingly, high social control was associated with slower performance on executive function. Significant interactions were observed between neighborhood quality and covariates. For example, higher perceived social cohesion was associated with slower average reaction time on memory and attention, particularly for individuals with higher depression total scores. In contrast, higher perceived social cohesion was associated with faster average reaction time on executive functioning, particularly for men.ConclusionThese findings underscore the importance of environmental characteristics for cognitive performance among Black adults. Further, these findings support the continued assessment of contextual factors as mechanisms or avenues for understanding how to improve cognitive functioning.

Pregnancy and Early Life Complications of PCOS

This presentation delves into the wide-ranging effects of Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) on women’s lives, specifically exploring its manifestations during adolescence and pregnancy. Starting with PCOS in early life, we delve into the hormonal shifts of puberty and their connection to PCOS development. Challenges of diagnosing PCOS in adolescents are discussed, along with the distinct cardiometabolic and psychological issues they face. The section concludes with pragmatic insights into the 2023 PCOS Guideline’s recommendations for managing PCOS during these pivotal years. Moving to PCOS during pregnancy, attention shifts to the complex hormonal and physiological adjustments the female body undergoes to support foetal growth. PCOS-related mechanisms that might contribute to pregnancy complications are examined. In addition, we present evidence from 2023 PCOS Guideline meta-analyses revealing the various pregnancy complications in this high-risk population. Concluding, we navigate antenatal care terrain aligned with the 2023 Guideline and present evidence on metformin’s role in PCOS pregnancies. This presentation provides a comprehensive view of PCOS from adolescence to pregnancy. By integrating up-to-date guidelines and evidence, it aims to equip healthcare professionals with practical insights for navigating PCOS’s complexities, ultimately improving patient care.

Effects of sex on the attentional orientation bias toward emotional expressions in children: An eye-tracking study.

Effects of sex on the attentional orientation bias toward emotional expressions in children: An eye-tracking study.

Language systematizes attention: How relational language enhances relational representation by guiding attention

Language can affect cognition, but through what mechanism? Substantial past research has focused on how labeling can elicit categorical representation during online processing. We focus here on a particularly powerful type of language—relational language—and show that relational language can enhance relational representation in children through an embodied attention mechanism. Four-year-old children were given a color-location conjunction task, in which they were asked to encode a two-color square, split either vertically or horizontally (e.g., red on the left, blue on the right), and later recall the same configuration from its mirror reflection. During the encoding phase, children in the experimental condition heard relational language (e.g., “Red is on the left of blue”), while those in the control condition heard generic non-relational language (e.g., “Look at this one, look at it closely”). At recall, children in the experimental condition were more successful at choosing the correct relational representation between the two colors compared to the control group. Moreover, they exhibited different attention patterns as predicted by the attention shift account of relational representation (Franconeri et al., 2012). To test the sustained effect of language and the role of attention, during the second half of the study, the experimental condition was given generic non-relational language. There was a sustained advantage in the experimental condition for both behavioral accuracies and signature attention patterns. Overall, our findings suggest that relational language enhances relational representation by guiding learners' attention, and this facilitative effect persists over time even in the absence of language. Implications for the mechanism of how relational language can enhance the learning of relational systems (e.g., mathematics, spatial cognition) by guiding attention will be discussed.

Comparing the Utility of Coupled Aero-Hydrodynamic Analysis Using a CFD Solver versus a Potential Flow Solver for Floating Offshore Wind Turbines

There has been a great effort towards development of renewable energy systems to combat global warming with significant interest towards research and development of floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs). With commercial projects such as Hywind Scotland, Hywind Tampen and others, there is a shift of industry attention from bottom-fixed offshore turbines to FOWTs. In this work, we focus on comparing industry standard Potential Flow (PF) methods versus Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) solvers for a scaled version of the IEA 15 MW turbine and associated FOWT system. The results from the two solvers are compared/validated using experimental thrust values for the fixed turbine. The motions and the thrust for the FOWT system are then compared for the two solvers along with hydrodynamic properties of the floater hull. The wake features downstream of the turbine are analyzed for the fixed and floating turbine using the CFD solver. The wake from the CFD solver is also compared with a simplified PF model. Finally, a simplified cost-benefit analysis is presented for the two solvers to compare the usefulness and utility of a CFD solver as compared to presently used industry-standard PF methods.

Optimizing component activation and operation aborting in missions with consecutive attempts and common abort command

Motivated by the demand of increasing the mission success probability, there is a shift of attention from single-attempt missions to multi-attempt missions in the mission aborting research. This paper advances the state of the art by modeling missions with multiple consecutive attempts, performed by identical components activated one by one with certain time interval. The mission is subject to a combined attempt aborting policy, encompassing an individual aborting rule (specified by the number of shocks experienced and an operation time threshold during an attempt) and a common aborting rule (specified by issuing time of the common abort command that causes immediate abort of all other attempts when any component is close enough to the mission completion). A numerical method is put forward to assess the mission success probability, expected number of lost components, and expected mission losses. The losses minimization problem is then formulated and solved to determine the optimal values of the attempt aborting policy parameters and the activation delay. The impacts of several mission and model parameters are investigated using a detailed case study of a reconnaissance mission performed by multiple unmanned aerial vehicles. The advantage of the proposed model in reducing the expected mission losses is also demonstrated using the case study.

The Establishment of Chinese Film Industry Studies and the Correction of Film Industrialization – Review and Prospect of the Twenty Years of Film Industrialization Reform

Abstract Over the past two decades, the industrialization of film and its discursive space have presented an open trend. Chinese film industry studies encompass multidimensional connotations involving economics, culture, and ideology. National will and policy-driven initiatives form the underlying logic of “industry studies,” while market-oriented approaches connect attention with the commodification of films, becoming the domain for the industry’s transformation. In the past twenty years, the industrial reform process of the Chinese film industry, along with innovations in film policies and institutions and their implementation, has reflected and outlined this multifaceted context. The film industry possesses the attributes of economy, culture, and ideology and, as a public good, includes issues related to attention orientation and correction. The construction of Chinese film industry studies, and the in-depth examination of the results and issues related to market discourse, is significant for further promoting the sustainable development of the film industry and fostering the prosperity of Chinese cinema.

The Impact of Spanish Repression on the Evolution of the Catalan Networked Public Sphere During the Post-Referendum Crisis (2017–2022)

ABSTRACT This article analyses the impact on the Catalan networked public sphere of the Spanish repression that unfolded following the organisation of a referendum on Catalonia’s independence in 2017. Grounded in nearly a decade of Twitter data, it reveals significant shifts in public attention towards state repression. Initially marginal, it gained prominence after the police operation started, surpassing general topics until COVID-19 emerged. Yet, its focus remained temporally limited compared to the persistent independence theme. Network analysis highlights media, political, and civil society actors’ influential roles in shaping the Catalan networked public sphere, with a prominence of white, cisgender, male crowdsourced elites leading the conversations.

Attentional bias towards happy faces in the dot-probe paradigm: it depends on which task is used

ABSTRACT Two recent articles [Gronchi et al., 2018. Automatic and controlled attentional orienting in the elderly: A dual-process view of the positivity effect. Acta Psychologica, 185, 229–234; Wirth & Wentura, 2020. It occurs after all: Attentional bias towards happy faces in the dot-probe task. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 82(5), 2463–2481] report attentional biases for happy facial expressions in the dot-probe paradigm, albeit in different directions. While Wirth and Wentura report a bias towards happy expressions, Gronchi et al. found a reversed effect. A striking difference between the studies was the task performed by the participants. While in Wirth and Wentura, participants performed a discrimination task, they performed a location task in Gronchi et al. In Experiment 1, we directly compared the two versions of the dot-probe paradigm. With the discrimination task, the bias towards happy faces was replicated. However, the location task yielded a null effect. In Experiment 2, we found a cueing effect with an abrupt onset cue in both tasks. However, for the location task a congruence-sequence effect (a typical characteristic of response-priming processes) occurred. This result suggests that in the location task, attentional processes are confounded with response-priming processes. We recommend to generally use discrimination tasks.

MSS-UNet: A Multi-Spatial-Shift MLP-based UNet for skin lesion segmentation

Multilayer perceptron (MLP) networks have become a popular alternative to convolutional neural networks and transformers because of fewer parameters. However, existing MLP-based models improve performance by increasing model depth, which adds computational complexity when processing local features of images. To meet this challenge, we propose MSS-UNet, a lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) and MLP model for the automated segmentation of skin lesions from dermoscopic images. Specifically, MSS-UNet first uses the convolutional module to extract local information, which is essential for precisely segmenting the skin lesion. We propose an efficient double-spatial-shift MLP module, named DSS-MLP, which enhances the vanilla MLP by enabling communication between different spatial locations through double spatial shifts. We also propose a module named MSSEA with multiple spatial shifts of different strides and lighter external attention to enlarge the local receptive field and capture the boundary continuity of skin lesions. We extensively evaluated the MSS-UNet on ISIC 2017, 2018, and PH2 skin lesion datasets. On three datasets, the method achieves IoU metrics of 85.01%±0.65, 83.65%±1.05, and 92.71%±1.03, with a parameter size and computational complexity of 0.33M and 15.98G, respectively, outperforming most state-of-the-art methods.The code is publicly available at https://github.com/AirZWH/MSS-UNet.

Reduced REM and N2 sleep, and lower dream intensity predict increased mind-wandering.

Mind-wandering is a mental state in which attention shifts from the present environment or current task to internally driven, self-referent mental content. Homeostatic sleep pressure seems to facilitate mind-wandering as indicated by studies observing links between increased mind-wandering and impaired sleep. Nevertheless, previous studies mostly relied on cross-sectional measurements and self-reports. We aimed to combine the accuracy of objective sleep measures with the use of self-reports in a naturalistic setting in order to examine if objective sleep parameters predict the tendency for increased mind-wandering on the following day. We used mobile sleep electroencephalographic (EEG) headbands and self-report scales over 7 consecutive nights in a group of 67 healthy participants yielding ~400 analyzable nights. Nights with more wakefulness and shorter REM and slow wave sleep were associated with poorer subjective sleep quality at the intraindividual level. Reduced REM and N2 sleep, as well as less intense dream experiences, predicted more mind-wandering the following day. Our micro-longitudinal study indicates that intraindividual fluctuations in the duration of specific sleep stages predict the perception of sleep quality as assessed in the morning, as well as the intensity of daytime mind-wandering the following hours. The combined application of sleep EEG assessments and self-reports over repeated assessments provides new insights into the subtle intraindividual, night-to-day associations between nighttime sleep and the next day's subjective experiences.