Distribution Of Attentional Resources Research Articles

Hello from the other side: Robust contralateral interference in tactile detection

Touch is unique among the sensory modalities in that our tactile receptors are spread across the body surface and continuously receive different inputs at the same time. These inputs vary in type, properties, relevance according to current goals, and, of course, location on the body. Sometimes, they must be integrated, and other times set apart and distinguished. Here, we investigate how simultaneous stimulation to different body sites affects tactile cognition. Specifically, we characterized the impact of irrelevant tactile sensations on tactile change detection. To this end, we embedded detection targets amidst ongoing performance, akin to the conditions encountered in everyday life, where we are constantly confronted with new events within ongoing stimuli. In the set of experiments presented here, participants detected a brief intensity change (.04 s) within an ongoing vibrotactile stimulus (1.6 s) that was always presented in a constantly attended location. The intensity change (i.e., the detection target) varied parametrically, from hardly detectable to easily detectable. In half of the trials, irrelevant ongoing stimulation was simultaneously presented to a site across the body midline, but participants were instructed to ignore it. In line with previous bimanual studies employing brief onset targets, we document robust interference on performance due to the irrelevant stimulation at each of the measured body sites (homologous and nonhomologous fingers, and the contralateral ankle). After describing this basic phenomenon, we further examine the conditions under which such interference occurs in three additional tasks. In each task, we honed in on a different aspect of the stimulation protocol (e.g., hand distance, the strength of the irrelevant stimulation, the detection target itself) in order to better understand the principles governing the observed interference effects. Our findings suggest a minimal role for exogenous attentional capture in producing the observed interference effects (Exp. 2), and a principled distribution of attentional resources or sensory integration between body sides (Exps. 3, 4). In our last study (Exp. 4), we presented bilateral tactile targets of varying intensities to both the relevant and irrelevant stimulation sites. We then characterized the degree to which the irrelevant stimulation is also processed. Our results—that participants’ perception of target intensity is always proportional to the combined bilateral signal—suggest that both body sites are equally weighed and processed despite clear instructions to attend only the target site. In light of this observation and participants’ inability to use selection processes to guide their perception, we propose that bilateral tactile inputs are automatically combined, quite possibly early in the hierarchy of somatosensory processing.

How do mindfulness and compassion programs improve mental health and well-being? The role of attentional processing of emotional information

Background and objectivesAlthough the benefits of Meditation-Based Programs are well documented, the mechanisms underlying these benefits have not been fully elucidated. Therefore, we examined whether: (1) formal training in mindfulness and compassion meditation modifies the distribution of attentional resources towards emotional information; and (2) whether changes in attentional processing of emotional information after the meditation programs mediate the improvements in psychological distress, emotion regulation, and well-being. MethodsA sample of 103 participants enrolled in the study: 36 in the mindfulness program (MBSR), 30 in the compassion program (CCT), and 37 in the no-intervention comparison group (CG). The assessment before and after the programs included the completion of an emotional Attentional Blink task (AB) together with self-report measures of psychological distress, emotion regulation, and well-being. ResultsMBSR and CCT reduced similarly the AB deficit, whereas no changes occurred in the CG. This AB reduction was found for the different emotional and non-emotional stimuli (i.e., negative, positive, and neutral), showing a significant disengagement from first-target emotions and significant accessibility of second-target emotions to consciousness. The effects of both meditation programs on the psychological measures were mediated by changes in the AB and emotion regulation skills. LimitationsDue to our naturalistic design in a real-world community setting, random assignment of participants was not feasible. ConclusionsMeditation may promote more flexible and balanced attention to emotional information, which may be a key transdiagnostic mechanism underlying its benefits on emotional distress and well-being.

El aporte del procesamiento cognitivo a los puntajes en matemáticas en el Tercer Estudio Regional Comparativo y Explicativo

International tests of massive application allow evaluating how individual, institutional, national, and family factors contribute to students' educational achievement through their performance. Consequently, education evaluation is based on the paradigm of general and specific competencies for life. One of these general competencies is the capacity to solve mathematical problems and apply logical thinking to problem-solving. In order to evaluate this general competence, standardized tests have been developed. Among these tests, the Third Regional Comparative and Explanatory Study (TERCE) in 2013 evaluated the mathematical and other areas' academic performance of children in the third and sixth grade. The TERCE Mathematics evaluation allows researchers to capture the students' academic performance in five domains: numeric, geometric, measurement, statistics, and variation, as well as their cognitive performance in objects and elements recognition and simple and complex problem-solving. In addition, to evaluate these eight dimensions, the TERCE test also asks for information regarding academic context, family environment, and teachers, among others. Despite this information, in Colombia and in general, the evaluation of the socioeconomic context over academic performance has been studied mainly considering the schools' characteristics, families' economic levels, and public expenses. Therefore, there is little evidence of the effects of psycho-pedagogical and psychological factors on academic performance. Psycho-pedagogical models emphasize the dependence of the superior processes on perceptual and attentional processes and the need for activities that demand deep processing and active involvement with information before, during, and after classes. Thus, attending simultaneously to different elements affects the development of cognitive control functions, which leads to low academic achievement and performance. Frequently, students face academic activities in different scenarios where the attentional system should divide its resources between several stimulus sources. Activities in which the attentional system focuses are “essential processing”, and those not related to the main academic activity are called “incidental processing”. Consequently, increasing the sources of incidental processing would decrease the attentional resources devoted to the essential processing of educational activities producing low academic performance. In this context, the study proposes and evaluates an effects model focused on essential and incidental cognitive processing of academic activities. The information was captured on the mathematics performance of sixth-grade students from 15 countries (and the state of Nuevo León de México) participating in the Third Regional Comparative and Explanatory Study (TERCE). A Structural Equations model was formulated using indices of Essential Processing (Attentional Control, Working Memory, and Family Supervision) and Incidental Processing (Perceived Violence, Leisure use of the computer, and incidental processing) based on the items or questions used in the TERCE. The indices were designed based on the Item Response Theory (IRT) model. Findings show that the proposed model affects the performance in the test by 24 points. Higher scores in essential processing produce higher scores in the mathematics component of the TERCE test. Family supervision of academic activity is the single element with the highest impact on academic performance (3.020); on the other hand, attentional control (7.48) and working memory (4.295) also impact academic performance positively. Regarding the incidental processing variables, lower levels of perceived violence (1.680), less noise and distractor in class (2.130), and higher use of computers at home for leisure activities (5.851) have the most significant impacts on academic performance. The results are discussed considering the cognitive hypotheses on the distribution of attention resources and the training hypothesis to understand information technologies' role in the academic processes. Suggestions for further research focus on the inclusion of items with a higher theoretical background that allows researchers to evaluate the impact of essential and incidental processing on academic performance using items specially designed with that goal to get more conclusive and robust results. https://doi.org/10.16888/interd.2023.40.1.17

Exploring psychopathy traits on intertemporal decision-making, neurophysiological correlates, and emotions on time estimation in community adults

There are certain characteristics of psychopathy that may be related to changes in intertemporal choices. Specifically, traits such as impulsivity or lack of inhibitory control may be associated with a more pronounced discounting function in intertemporal choices (IC) and, in turn, this function may be based on changes in the basic mechanisms of time estimation (TE). Therefore, this study aimed to examine potential differences in neurophysiological correlates, specifically through N1, P3, and LPP measurements, which may be related to TE and IC, examining their modulation according to psychopathic traits, different emotional conditions, and different decision-making conditions. This experimental study included 67 adult participants (48 women) from the northern region of Portugal, who performed an intertemporal decision-making task and, of those, 19 participants (16 women), with a mean age of 25 years (SD = 5.41) and a mean of 16 years of schooling (SD = 3.37) performed the time estimation task. The instruments/measures applied were MoCA, used as a neurocognitive screening tool; the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure (TriPM), a self-report instrument with 58 items that map the core features of psychopathy along three facets – boldness, meanness, and disinhibition – and considers them continuously distributed among the general population; intertemporal decision-making and time estimation tasks – for the time estimation task, the stimuli consisted of 45 color images extracted from the Nencki Affective Picture System (NAPS). In the TE task, there was an almost significant effect of disinhibition on the values of θ, with higher values on this variable associated with greater values of θ in the unpleasant emotional condition. In the IC task, there were no significant effects of any psychopathy measure on the values of the gains and losses ratios. In addition, the analysis of the neurophysiological correlates of the IC task did not reveal a main effect of the decision-making condition, nor effects of any psychopathy measure on the N1 and P3 amplitudes. The analysis of the neurophysiological correlates of the TE task revealed that higher meanness values are associated with smaller N1 amplitude in the pleasant emotional condition, whereas higher disinhibition values are associated with greater N1 amplitude in the pleasant emotional condition. Still in this task, higher disinhibition values were associated with a smaller LPP amplitude in the unpleasant emotional condition. The increase in the distribution of attention resources towards time and/or the increase in activation states, including those originated by responses to emotional stimuli, may be the main factor that alters the way impulsive individuals and, presumably, individuals with high psychopathy, consider time when making decisions.

How stereotype threat affects the brain dynamics of creative thinking in female students

When people are placed in a situation where they are at risk of substantiating a negative stereotype about their social group (a scenario termed stereotype threat), the extra pressure to avoid this outcome can undermine their performance. Substantial and consistent gender disparities in STEM fields leave women vulnerable to stereotype threat, including the stereotype that women are not as good at generating creative and innovative ideas as men. We tested whether female students’ creative thinking is affected by a stereotype threat by measuring power in the alpha frequency band (8–12Hz oscillations) that has been associated with better creative thinking outcomes. Counter to expectations that a stereotype threat would reduce alpha power associated with creative thinking, analyses showed increased alpha power following the introduction of the stereotype threat. This outcome suggests that women may have attempted to increase their internal attention during the task in order to disprove the stereotype. Behaviorally, this effort did not lead to changes in creative performance, suggesting that the stereotype threat decoupled alpha power from creative thinking outcomes. These results support a growing school of thought in the neuroscience of creativity literature that the alpha power often seen in conjunction with creative behavior is not necessarily related to the creativity processes themselves, but rather might be part of a larger network modulating the distribution of attentional resources more broadly.

Influences of active control on attention allocation in MOT.

We investigated the influence of active involvement on the way visual attention is distributed during multiple-object tracking (MOT), specifically when objects bounce, using two experiments modeled after the videogame Pong. In both experiments, participants were either assigned to an active group or a passive group. The active groups were instructed to move a virtual paddle in order to bounce target objects as often as possible. Participants in the passive groups viewed recordings of trials from the active groups. In all conditions, participants were asked to track the target objects and to detect dot probes that briefly appeared on the screen. Using probe detection, we explored the distribution of attentional resources over the linear and bounce trajectories of tracked objects. We found that active involvement can enhance probe detection along the future post-bounce trajectory, but it depends on the difficulty of the task.

That's me in the spotlight: Self-relevance modulates attentional breadth.

A core prediction of models of social-cognitive functioning is that attention is preferentially tuned to self-relevant material. Surprisingly, however, evidence in support of this viewpoint is scant. Remedying this situation, here we demonstrated that self-relevance influences the distribution of attentional resources during decisional processing. In a flanker task (N = 60), participants reported if to-be-judged stimuli either denoted, or were owned by, the self or a friend. A consistent pattern of results emerged across both judgment tasks. Whereas the identification of friend-related targets was speeded when the items were flanked by compatible compared with incompatible flankers, responses to self-related targets were resistant to flanker interference. Probing the origin of these effects, a further computational analysis (i.e., Shrinking Spotlight Diffusion Model analysis) confirmed that self-relevance impacted the focusing of attention during decision-making. These findings highlight how self-relevance modulates attentional processing.

Decreased attentional allocation to centrally presented positive stimuli in individuals with depressive symptoms

Lack of positive emotion is considered an important aspect of depression. Previous studies have reported decreased attention to positive information for individuals with depressive symptoms; however, such studies have not investigated whether decreased attentional allocation occurs even when participants are required to fixate centrally on items presented in the visual field. In the present study, the attentional window (i.e., the spatial distribution of attentional resources) was measured with a modified version of the digit-parity task. In this task, the participants had to fixate on the centrally presented emotional face stimuli, and they were required to respond to the peripherally presented targets. The results indicated that individuals with higher levels of depressive symptoms were slower to respond when a target appeared near happy faces, which suggested decreased allocation of attention. Moreover, decreased allocation of attention to positive faces was found only in depressive individuals, not in individuals with social anxiety. The present findings suggest that individuals with higher levels of depressive symptoms allocate less attentional resources to positive stimuli, even when they are required to attend to them.

Usersandrsquo; Behaviours and Features in Internet Forum

Purpose: Attention resource is scarce. Organizing community activities in online forums faces the challenge of attracting users’ limited attention. Understanding how users of online forums allocate, maintain, and change their attentional focus and what features of online forms influence their attention behaviors is critical for effective information design. This paper seeks understanding of users’ attention behaviors and features when they participate in discussions in online forums. Design/methodology/approach: A conceptual model was established to explore the indicator system of attention’s measurement. The related attention data were collected from Alexa Access Statistics Tool and Katie community. Then this paper computed the correlation coefficient and regression relationship between the indicators of visual attention and cognitive attention. There after this paper analyzed and discussed users’ attention behaviors and features in Internet forum. Findings: Relevant bivariate correlation analysis and regression analysis discovers that Internet forum's attention is mainly as visual attention in users’ early involvement. Attention resources can be transformed. In a deep participation, users’ cognitive attention is more significant. Meanwhile cognitive attention behaviors’ further development will lead to the phenomenon that cognitive attention input is prone to increase faster in the early duration. That means in-depth discussion and interaction are more likely to appear in the early stages of participation. Research limitations/implications: There are some limitations about this study. The indicators are not comprehensive enough because factors affecting the distribution of attention resources in Internet forums are complex. We didn’t distinguish different types of Internet forums when we collected the relevant data. Future research will focus more on how to obtain comprehensive attention data. Originality/value: This paper shows a new perspective that we can find users’ attention behaviors and features using the attention data from its mapping object, which can help operators of portals and Internet communities to attract users’ limited attention.

Proactively location-based suppression elicited by statistical learning.

Recently, Wang and Theeuwes used the additional singleton task and showed that attentional capture was reduced for the location that was likely to contain a distractor [1]. It is argued that due to statistical learning, the location that was likely to contain a distractor was suppressed relative to all other locations. The current study replicated these findings and by adding a search-probe condition, we were able to determine the initial distribution of attentional resources across the visual field. Consistent with a space-based resource allocation ("biased competition") model, it was shown that the representation of a probe presented at the location that was likely to contain a distractor was suppressed relative to other locations. Critically, the suppression of this location resulted in more attention being allocated to the target location relative to a condition in which the distractor was not suppressed. This suggests that less capture by the distractor results in more attention being allocated to the target. The results are consistent with the view that the location that is likely to contain a distractor is suppressed before display onset, modulating the first feed-forward sweep of information input into the spatial priority map.

Brief Meditation Trainings Improve Performance in the Emotional Attentional Blink

To efficiently handle the continuous flow of information to which the attentional system is exposed, humans are equipped with filters like the attentional blink (i.e., a failure to detect a second target when it is presented between 200 and 500 ms after the first one). The aim of this study was to examine whether the practice of two standardized meditation programs (i.e., mindfulness and compassion) could modify the allocation of attentional resources towards emotional information. A sample of 90 participants (43 in the mindfulness group and 47 in the compassion group) performed a variant of the emotional attentional blink task using negative, positive, and neutral faces, before and after the 8-week meditation programs. Both programs significantly decreased the standard AB effect (F(1.65, 145.58) = 39.79, p < .001, η2partial = .31) with only minor differences between them. Furthermore, the AB reduction after the programs varied according to the different emotional faces used (F(3.10, 272.83) = 4.44, p < .05, η2partial = .05). Results suggest that standardized 8-week meditation programs may significantly change early stages of emotional stimuli processing while promoting a more balanced distribution of attentional resources towards emotional information.

TVA in action: Attention capacity and selectivity during coordinated eye-hand movements

Goal-directed eye and hand movements are preceded by attention shifts towards the movement targets. Whether attentional resources can be allocated independently towards multiple effector target locations or whether a single attentional system underlies target selection for multiple effectors, is controversially debated. Here, we used the TVA approach (Theory of Visual Attention, Bundesen, 1990) to measure the distribution of attentional resources before single and combined eye-hand movements. We applied a whole report paradigm in which six letters arranged in a semi-circle were briefly (17--167ms) presented. Observers (n=8) performed single eye or hand movements, or combined eye and hand movements to centrally cued locations. Gaze and finger positions were recorded with a video-based eye-tracker and a touch screen. We used letter categorization performance as a proxy of attentional capacity and modelled the data according to the TVA framework. Additionally, we used the TVA-model to estimate the probability of correct categorization at motor targets and non-targets to evaluate attention selectivity. This allowed to directly determine attention capacity (processing speed) at multiple, movement-relevant and -irrelevant locations within a single trial. Our results show that total attention capacity is constant across the different action conditions and does not increase with the number of active effectors. However, attention is predominantly allocated towards the movement-relevant locations. The data demonstrate that attentional resources can be allocated simultaneously and independently towards both, eye and finger targets during the combined movements without competition, although associated with attentional costs occurring at movement-irrelevant locations. Overall, our findings suggest that attention can indeed be allocated towards multiple effector targets in parallel, as long as sufficient attentional resources are available. They also demonstrate, for the first time, that the TVA framework can be used as a sensitive tool to measure action-related shifts of visual attention.

EEG analysis of Attention Resource Allocation of Tennis Players

In this paper, event-related potential (ERP) technology is used to study the distribution of attention resources of tennis related information by tennis experts, and to preliminarily explore the reasons for the perception advantages of sports experts. The study included two separate experiments. In the first experiment, the point-probing paradigm was used to study the response time of attention bias characteristics under different emotions. In the second experiment, ERP technology was used to study the attention resources allocation method of tennis experts to the tennis scene, trying to explain the expert's attention advantage from the perspective of central nervous system. Through this study, we find that for the tennis experts, there is an attention competition between the tennis scenes and the negative emotional faces, which shows that in the presence of attention competition, tennis experts will have a higher attention level to the scene information related to professional skills; sports experts have an attention bias tendency to skill-related scene information, which may be the mechanism behind the phenomenon that “experts can process scene information faster or at a higher level”.

Anterior insula hyperactivation in ADHD when faced with distracting negative stimuli.

Patients with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) suffer from poor emotion regulation that might arise from problems in the distribution of attentional resources when confronted with emotional distractors. Previous studies investigating the neurocognitive basis of these problems remain inconclusive. Moreover, most of these studies did not exclude participants with comorbidity, particularly of conduct or oppositional defiant disorder. The aim of this study was to assess alterations in fronto-limbic activation in ADHD adolescents specifically during negative distractors in an emotional attention task. For this purpose, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess 25 boys with noncomorbid ADHD and 25 typically developing (TD) boys while they performed an emotional attention task with positive, negative, and neutral emotional distractors. Boys with ADHD had increased activation relative to TD boys specifically during the negative valenced stimuli in an emotional processing network comprising left anterior insula reaching into the inferior frontal gyrus. The findings suggest altered salience processing in ADHD of negative valenced emotional stimuli that may lead to higher distractibility in ADHD specifically when faced with negative emotional distractors.

A Brief Period of Postnatal Visual Deprivation Alters the Balance between Auditory and Visual Attention

Is a short and transient period of visual deprivation early in life sufficient to induce lifelong changes inhow we attend to, and integrate, simple visual and auditory information [1, 2]? This question is of crucial importance given the recent demonstration in both animals and humans that a period of blindness early in life permanently affects the brain networks dedicated to visual, auditory, and multisensory processing [1-16]. To address this issue, we compared a group of adults who had been treated for congenital bilateral cataracts during early infancy with a group of normally sighted controls on a task requiring simple detection of lateralized visual and auditory targets, presented alone or in combination. Redundancy gains obtained from the audiovisual conditions were similar between groups and surpassed the reaction time distribution predicted by Miller's race model. However, in comparison to controls, cataract-reversal patients were faster at processing simple auditory targets and showed differences in how they shifted attention across modalities. Specifically, they were faster at switching attention from visual to auditory inputs than in the reverse situation, while an opposite pattern was observed for controls. Overall, these results reveal that the absence of visual inputduring the first months of life does not prevent the development of audiovisual integration but enhances the salience of simple auditory inputs, leading to a different crossmodal distribution of attentional resources between auditory and visual stimuli.

Generalized Anxiety Disorder modulates emotional processing in central and peripheral vision

Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) is associated with an attentional bias toward emotional information leading to behavioral manifestations which need to be clarified. In healthy participants, the emotional visual stimuli have been shown to capture the attentional resources not only in central vision (CV) but also in impoverished visual conditions as those of the peripheral vision (PV). Hence, it seems necessary to study the processing of emotional information and its behavioral impact in both CV and PV. Objective: The aim of this study was to compare, in patients with GAD and in healthy controls (HC), the behavioral impact of the emotional value of natural scenes presented in CV or in PV. Method: Ten patients with GAD and ten HC matched for age, gender and education level were presented with standardized emotional pictures from the International affective Picture System (IAPS). Three groups of 300 pictures (unpleasant, neutral and pleasant) were presented at three visual eccentricities (CV: 0°; PV: -12° and +12°). The 900 trials were split into 4 blocks during which the participants had to fix a cross in the center of the screen and to report the location of the pictures (left, center or right) using a keypad. We analyzed the behavioral responses: reaction time, the accuracy and the Speed-Accuracy Composite Score (SACS) which measures the efficiency of the response, and the dynamic of the cerebral events using the magnetoencephalography (MEG). Results: The reaction times of patients with GAD were reduced when pictures were emotional while those of HC were increased. Besides, while HC showed a lower efficiency when discriminating the location of pictures appearing in CV, patients demonstrated an equal efficiency in CV and PV. An early occipital component (90 ms) was correlated with the emotional effect. Discussion and conclusion: Patients with GAD showed a high sensitivity to emotional visual information, revealed by an improvement of the efficiency when they responded to emotional pictures and by an early occipital activation. Furthermore, while patients showed similar efficiency regardless of the position of the pictures, HC seemed to expend more attentional resources to monitor the peripheral field which appeared detrimental to the CV. Therefore, our data suggest that a large distribution of attentional resources in visual space is easier for anxious patients than for controls.

EP 119. Neural correlates of attention allocation during episodic long-term memory encoding and retrieval

Directing mental resources, i.e. attention, to a relevant stimulus forms a critical part in the formation and retrieval of memory traces – be it in working memory (WM) or long-term memory (LTM). For the formation of episodic memories the relevant stimuli furthermore need to be processed in relation to each other and/or to their context. Research into the neural correlates of the allocation of attention in mnemonic processing has received increasing interest in the last few years. The EEG correlates of attention allocation to item and context information during episodic encoding, on the other hand, are not yet fully understood. We designed an episodic LTM EEG experiment where we examined the activity in and interactions of prefrontal and posterior cortical areas associated with WM and attention allocation as well as the binding of items and their context in episodic LTM encoding and retrieval. Participants saw a background picture of mountain scenes and a word in a central position on a computer screen and were instructed to memorise either the picture, the word, both individually or both and that they were presented together. Here, we will present evidence indicating that the manipulation of the distribution of attentional resources to the different stimuli and their relation led to differences in the performance on a later LTM recognition test. Furthermore, we will present EEG oscillatory correlates – on scalp as well as source level – for the different encoding strategies highlighting activity representing the binding of an item and its context in episodic memory encoding as well as retrieval. Interactions between various cortical areas will be discussed in terms of phase coupling within circumscribed frequency bands.

Attentional Resource Allocation in Visuotactile Processing Depends on the Task, But Optimal Visuotactile Integration Does Not Depend on Attentional Resources.

Humans constantly process and integrate sensory input from multiple sensory modalities. However, the amount of input that can be processed is constrained by limited attentional resources. A matter of ongoing debate is whether attentional resources are shared across sensory modalities, and whether multisensory integration is dependent on attentional resources. Previous research suggested that the distribution of attentional resources across sensory modalities depends on the the type of tasks. Here, we tested a novel task combination in a dual task paradigm: Participants performed a self-terminated visual search task and a localization task in either separate sensory modalities (i.e., haptics and vision) or both within the visual modality. Tasks considerably interfered. However, participants performed the visual search task faster when the localization task was performed in the tactile modality in comparison to performing both tasks within the visual modality. This finding indicates that tasks performed in separate sensory modalities rely in part on distinct attentional resources. Nevertheless, participants integrated visuotactile information optimally in the localization task even when attentional resources were diverted to the visual search task. Overall, our findings suggest that visual search and tactile localization partly rely on distinct attentional resources, and that optimal visuotactile integration is not dependent on attentional resources.

Role of the Frontal Cortex in Standing Postural Sway Tasks While Dual-Tasking: A Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Study Examining Working Memory Capacity.

Posture control during a dual-task involves changing the distribution of attention resources between the cognitive and motor tasks and involves the frontal cortex working memory (WM). The present study aimed to better understand the impact of frontal lobe activity and WM capacity in postural control during a dual-task. High and low WM-span groups were compared using their reading span test scores. High and low WM capacity were compared based on cognitive and balance performance and hemoglobin oxygenation (oxyHb) levels during standing during single (S-S), standing during dual (S-D), one leg standing during single (O-S), and one leg standing during dual (O-D) tasks. For sway pass length, significant difference in only the O-D task was observed between both groups. oxyHb levels were markedly increased in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and supplementary motor area in the high-span group during a dual-task. Therefore, WM capacity influenced the allocation of attentional resources and motor performance.

Users’ attention behaviors and features in internet forum

Purpose: Attention resource is scarce. Organizing community activities in online forums faces the challenge of attracting users’ limited attention. Understanding how users of online forums allocate, maintain, and change their attentional focus and what features of online forms influence their attention behaviors is critical for effective information design. This paper seeks understanding of users’ attention behaviors and features when they participate in discussions in online forums. Design/methodology/approach: A conceptual model was established to explore the indicator system of attention’s measurement. The related attention data were collected from Alexa Access Statistics Tool and Katie community. Then this paper computed the correlation coefficient and regression relationship between the indicators of visual attention and cognitive attention. Thereafter this paper analyzed and discussed users’ attention behaviors and features in Internet forum. Findings: Relevant bivariate correlation analysis and regression analysis discovers that Internet forum's attention is mainly as visual attention in users’ early involvement. Attention resources can be transformed. In a deep participation, users’ cognitive attention is more significant. Meanwhile cognitive attention behaviors’ further development will lead to the phenomenon that cognitive attention input is prone to increase faster in the early duration. That means in-depth discussion and interaction are more likely to appear in the early stages of participation. Research limitations/implications: There are some limitations about this study. The indicators are not comprehensive enough because factors affecting the distribution of attention resources in Internet forums are complex. We didn’t distinguish different types of Internet forums when we collected the relevant data. Future research will focus more on how to obtain comprehensive attention data. Originality/value: T his paper shows a new perspective that we can find users’ attention behaviors and features using the attention data from its mapping object, which can help operators of portals and Internet communities to attract users’ limited attention.