Automatic Attraction Of Attention Research Articles

Rapid Ocular Responses Are Modulated by Bottom-up-Driven Auditory Salience.

Despite the prevalent use of alerting sounds in alarms and human–machine interface systems and the long-hypothesized role of the auditory system as the brain's “early warning system,” we have only a rudimentary understanding of what determines auditory salience—the automatic attraction of attention by sound—and which brain mechanisms underlie this process. A major roadblock has been the lack of a robust, objective means of quantifying sound-driven attentional capture. Here we demonstrate that: (1) a reliable salience scale can be obtained from crowd-sourcing (N = 911), (2) acoustic roughness appears to be a driving feature behind this scaling, consistent with previous reports implicating roughness in the perceptual distinctiveness of sounds, and (3) crowd-sourced auditory salience correlates with objective autonomic measures. Specifically, we show that a salience ranking obtained from online raters correlated robustly with the superior colliculus-mediated ocular freezing response, microsaccadic inhibition (MSI), measured in naive, passively listening human participants (of either sex). More salient sounds evoked earlier and larger MSI, consistent with a faster orienting response. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that MSI reflects a general reorienting response that is evoked by potentially behaviorally important events regardless of their modality.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Microsaccades are small, rapid, fixational eye movements that are measurable with sensitive eye-tracking equipment. We reveal a novel, robust link between microsaccade dynamics and the subjective salience of brief sounds (salience rankings obtained from a large number of participants in an online experiment): Within 300 ms of sound onset, the eyes of naive, passively listening participants demonstrate different microsaccade patterns as a function of the sound's crowd-sourced salience. These results position the superior colliculus (hypothesized to underlie microsaccade generation) as an important brain area to investigate in the context of a putative multimodal salience hub. They also demonstrate an objective means for quantifying auditory salience.

Effects of Instructions on the Early Stages of the Visual Perception of Verbal Stimuli in Health and Schizophrenia

We report here studies of the early stages in the selection of meaningful and meaningless verbal information in one implicit and two explicit tasks on the latency and amplitude of the P100 component of event-related potentials in healthy subjects (n = 99) and patients with schizophrenia in the first psychotic episode (n = 102). Schizophrenia patients displayed greater impairment to the passive perception of meaningful verbal information. Giving instructions made no difference to the properties of the P100 wave from those in healthy subjects. A decrease in the amplitude of the P100 component on perception of words in passive observation conditions seen in patients may be linked with the severity of hallucinations. The relationships of the P100 wave showed that provision of instructions, as compared with passive perception, decreased the time taken for primary analysis of stimuli in healthy subjects regardless of category and relevance, while this occurred only on reading pseudowords in schizophrenia patients. The results obtained here provide evidence of impairments to the automatic attraction of attention to the semantically significant content of verbal stimuli. The studies reported here demonstrated a link between the properties of the P100 wave and behavioral parameters.

Effects of task-irrelevant emotional information on deception

ABSTRACTDeception has been reported to be influenced by task-relevant emotional information from an external stimulus. However, it remains unclear how task-irrelevant emotional information would influence deception. In the present study, facial expressions of different valence and emotion intensity were presented to participants, where they were asked to make either truthful or deceptive gender judgments according to the preceding cues. We observed the influence of facial expression intensity upon individuals’ cognitive cost of deceiving (mean difference of individuals’ truthful and deceptive response times). Larger cost was observed for high intensity faces compared to low intensity faces. These results provided insights on how automatic attraction of attention evoked by task-irrelevant emotional information in facial expressions influenced individuals’ cognitive cost of deceiving.

P 17 Neural signatures of post-perceptual attention and selective working memory encoding

Post-perceptual cues can enhance visual short term memory encoding even after the offset of the visual stimulus. However, both the mechanisms by which the sensory stimulus characteristics are buffered as well as the mechanisms by which post-perceptual selective attention enhances short term memory encoding remain unclear. We analyzed late post-perceptual event-related potentials (ERP) in visual change detection tasks (100 ms stimulus duration) by high-resolution ERP analysis to elucidate these mechanisms. The effects of auditory post-cues (300 ms or 850 ms after visual stimulus onset) as well as the effects of a visual interference stimulus were examined in 27 healthy right-handed adults. Focusing attention with post-perceptual cues at both latencies significantly improved memory performance, i.e. sensory stimulus characteristics were available for up to 850 ms after stimulus presentation. Passive watching of the visual stimuli evoked a slow negative wave over occipito-temporal visual areas. In the memory task, this N700 was strongly reduced by a visual interference stimulus which impeded memory maintenance. Therefore N700 could reflect visual post-processing by automatic attention attraction – when visual post-processing is not impeded by interference effects. In contrast, contralateral delay activity (CDA) still developed after the application of auditory post-cues in the retroactive interference condition. Thus CDA may reflect the top-down process of searching selectively for the required information through post-perceptual attention. N700 and CDA could be dissociated by retroactive interference effects and seem to represent two different processes involved in short term memory encoding. We discuss the meaning of cortical slow negative waves during post-perceptual attention changes in different modalities (olfactory, auditory, somatosensory, motor/proprioceptive, visual) in order to elucidate general mechanisms of the selective encoding of sensory features in working Hecht et al., 2016 , Lenk et al., 2014 , Bender et al., 2014 , Bender et al., 2012 , Bender et al., 2012 , Thiemann et al., 2012 , Bender et al., 2010 .

Time-resolved neuroimaging of visual short term memory consolidation by post-perceptual attention shifts

Post-perceptual cues can enhance visual short term memory encoding even after the offset of the visual stimulus. However, both the mechanisms by which the sensory stimulus characteristics are buffered as well as the mechanisms by which post-perceptual selective attention enhances short term memory encoding remain unclear.We analyzed late post-perceptual event-related potentials (ERPs) in visual change detection tasks (100ms stimulus duration) by high-resolution ERP analysis to elucidate these mechanisms. The effects of early and late auditory post-cues (300ms or 850ms after visual stimulus onset) as well as the effects of a visual interference stimulus were examined in 27 healthy right-handed adults.Focusing attention with post-perceptual cues at both latencies significantly improved memory performance, i.e. sensory stimulus characteristics were available for up to 850ms after stimulus presentation. Passive watching of the visual stimuli without auditory cue presentation evoked a slow negative wave (N700) over occipito-temporal visual areas. N700 was strongly reduced by a visual interference stimulus which impeded memory maintenance. In contrast, contralateral delay activity (CDA) still developed in this condition after the application of auditory post-cues and was thereby dissociated from N700.CDA and N700 seem to represent two different processes involved in short term memory encoding. While N700 could reflect visual post processing by automatic attention attraction, CDA may reflect the top-down process of searching selectively for the required information through post-perceptual attention.

Stereotype threat prevents perceptual learning

Stereotype threat (ST) refers to a situation in which a member of a group fears that her or his performance will validate an existing negative performance stereotype, causing a decrease in performance. For example, reminding women of the stereotype "women are bad at math" causes them to perform more poorly on math questions from the SAT and GRE. Performance deficits can be of several types and be produced by several mechanisms. We show that ST prevents perceptual learning, defined in our task as an increasing rate of search for a target Chinese character in a display of such characters. Displays contained two or four characters and half of these contained a target. Search rate increased across a session of training for a control group of women, but not women under ST. Speeding of search is typically explained in terms of learned "popout" (automatic attraction of attention to a target). Did women under ST learn popout but fail to express it? Following training, the women were shown two colored squares and asked to choose the one with the greater color saturation. Superimposed on the squares were task-irrelevant Chinese characters. For women not trained under ST, the presence of a trained target on one square slowed responding, indicating that training had caused the learning of an attention response to targets. Women trained under ST showed no slowing, indicating that they had not learned such an attention response.

Does training under consistent mapping conditions lead to automatic attention attraction to targets in search tasks?

Schneider and Shiffrin (1977) proposed that training under consistent stimulus-response mapping (CM) leads to automatic target detection in search tasks. Other theories, such as Treisman and Gelade's (1980) feature integration theory, consider target-distractor discriminability as the main determinant of search performance. The first two experiments pit these two principles against each other. The results show that CM training is neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve optimal search performance. Two other experiments examine whether CM trained targets, presented as distractors in unattended display locations, attract attention away from current targets. The results are again found to vary with target-distractor similarity. Overall, the present study strongly suggests that CM training does not invariably lead to automatic attention attraction in search tasks.

Influence of Affective Meaning on Memory for Contextual Information.

In 4 experiments, the authors investigated the influence of the affective meaning of words on memory for 2 kinds of contextual features that differ in the amount of effortful processes they require to be encoded in memory (i.e., color and spatial location). The main results showed that memory for color, in which words were typed, was better for emotional than for neutral words, but only when color information was learned incidentally. In contrast, spatial location of the words was better remembered for emotional than for neutral words whatever the encoding conditions (intentional vs. incidental). It is suggested that the influence of affective meaning on context memory may involve an automatic attraction of attention to contextual features associated with emotional words.

Negative priming for spatial location?

The term negative priming has been used to describe the deleterious consequences for performance when the current target shares properties with an ignored distractor from the previous trial. Location-based negative priming was first reported by Tipper, Brehaut, and Driver (1990) who used a prime-probe procedure wherein the task was to localize targets defined by their identity (shape). Design imbalances in this seminal study, and others, are illustrated and it is indicated how these might have contaminated the reported effects. The findings, from three experiments using an unbiased design, suggest that negative priming in the spatial location procedure may be more closely related to inhibition of return (IOR), or to the automatic attraction of attention by new objects, than to the concepts of distractor inhibition, episodic retrieval, and feature mismatch, which have traditionally been used to explain negative priming for spatial location.

Automatic attraction of attention to former targets in visual displays of letters.

Shiffrin and Schneider (1977, Experiment 4d) reported that after consistent training in search for particular alphanumeric characters, presentation of one of these characters (former targets) as a distractor impeded detection of simultaneously presented current targets. Even if presented in an irrelevant display location, the former target appeared to attract attention. Here, we analyze weaknesses in the design of Experiment 4d and report four follow-up experiments ranging from a fairly close replication of the original multiframe experiment to a rather conventional single-frame search study. In each experiment, presentation of former targets consistently impeded detection of simultaneously presented current targets. The results suggest that automatic attention attraction to individual alphanumeric characters develops not only in the special experimental paradigm used by Shiffrin and Schneider, but also in standard visual search tasks. The fact that attention appeared to be attracted by shapes as complex as individual letters supports the assumption that simultaneously presented visual stimuli can be compared in parallel against memory representations of alphanumeric characters.

Automatization and Training in Visual Search

In several search tasks, the amount of practice on particular combinations of targets and distractors was equated in varied-mapping (VM) and consistent-mapping (CM) conditions. The results indicate the importance of distinguishing between memory and visual search tasks, and implicate a number of factors that play important roles in visual search and its learning. Visual search was studied in Experiment 1. VM and CM performance were almost equal, and slope reductions occurred during practice for both, suggesting the learning of efficient attentive search based on features, and no important role for automatic attention attraction. However, positive transfer effects occurred when previous CM targets were re-paired with previous CM distractors, even though these targets and distractors had not been trained together. Also, the introduction of a demanding simultaneous task produced advantages of CM over VM. These latter two results demonstrated the operation of automatic attention attraction. Visual search was further studied in Experiment 2, using novel characters for which feature overlap and similarity were controlled. The design and many of the findings paralleled Experiment 1. In addition, enormous search improvement was seen over 35 sessions of training, suggesting the operation of perceptual unitization for the novel characters. Experiment 3 showed a large, persistent advantage for CM over VM performance in memory search, even when practice on particular combinations of targets and distractors was equated in the two training conditions. A multifactor theory of automatization and attention is put forth to account for these findings and others in the literature.

A model of automatic attention attraction when mapping is partially consistent.

A model is described to account for the data of Durso, Cooke, Breen, and Schvaneveldt (1987). On the basis of the relative frequency of an item's presentation as a target, the item develops an automatic tendency to attract attention. When stimuli are then displayed, each calls the attention system to a degree determined by its present strength. We assume that attention eventually drifts to the strongest stimulus (which is then given as a response), but in a time determined inversely by the difference in strength between the two strongest stimuli. A version of this model in which the strengths were freely estimated parameters predicted the various elements of the data with good accuracy. In other versions of the model, strength values were derived from assumptions concerning the learning of automatism. Two of these models, quite different in character, captured the major qualitative features of the data. Further empirical tests of the models are suggested.

A model of automatic attention attraction when mapping is partially consistent.

A model of automatic attention attraction when mapping is partially consistent.