Goal-directed Attentional Control Research Articles

The Benefits of Playing Action-Like Video Games on Salience Processing

Play is essential for sensorimotor, cognitive and social development, because it enhances the experience-based long-term plasticity, stimulating the optimal interplay between the stimulus-driven and goal-directed attentional control. However, the emotional, psychophysiological and neurocognitive mechanisms associated with a single game session are not fully understood. In a single-blind randomized-crossover experiment, we investigated the short-term effects upon emotional, psychophysiological and neurocognitive functioning after a short play session with Mario Kart and with a puzzle board game, in a sample of 60 young adult typical (n = 44) and poor readers (n = 16). By enhancing positive and reducing negative emotions, playing an action-like video game increased heart rate and salience processing in both typical and poor readers, whereas an improvement in reading speed was reported only in poor readers. The stimulation of the salience network by play-driven emotional, multisensory and sensorimotor activation, can transiently enhance the feed-forward functioning of the perception and action pathways.

High task demand in dual-target paradigm redirects experimentally increased anxiety to uphold goal-directed attention.

Previous research has shown that state anxiety facilitates stimulus-driven attentional capture and impairs goal-directed attentional control by increasing sensitivity to salient distractors or threat cues or narrowing spatial attention. However, recent findings in this area have been mixed, and less is known about how state-dependent anxiety may affect attentional performance. Here, we employed a novel dual-target search paradigm to investigate this relationship. This paradigm allowed us to investigate attentional control and how focus narrows under different anxiety states. Participants watched a short movie-either anxiety-inducing or neutral-before engaging in the dual-target visual search task. We found that they performed faster and more accurately in trials without the salient distractor compared to those with distractors, and they performed better in tasks presented on the center than the periphery. However, despite a significant increase in self-reported anxiety in the anxiety-inducing session, participants' performance in terms of speed and accuracy remain comparable across both anxious and neutral sessions. This resilience is likely due to compensatory mechanisms that offset anxiety, a result of the high demands and working memory load inherent in the dual-target task.

MECHANISMS OF ATTENTIONAL CONTROL AND SUPPRESSION IN AGING

Abstract Attentional control plays a crucial role in our daily lives by allowing our brains to selectively process relevant information while filtering out task-irrelevant distractions. Due to aging, older adults have demonstrated a heightened propensity to be more distractible. This decreased ability to regulate attention has been attributed to an inability to inhibit task-irrelevant salient stimuli. However, the specific mechanisms that underlie this age-related alteration remain unclear. In this study, we utilized a visual search paradigm that directly measures mechanisms of attentional suppression to test our hypothesis that older adults demonstrate reduced capabilities to suppress task-irrelevant information. Young adults (aged 18-35) and older adults (aged 50-80) were tasked to utilize goal-directed attentional control by fixating at a specific target shape. Critically, in some trials, individuals were exposed to a salient color shape that acted as a singleton distractor. While young adults show the ability to suppress attentional allocation to this salient distractor in this paradigm, we hypothesized that older adults would demonstrate attentional capture by this salient distractor. Our findings revealed that older adults made significantly fewer first-fixations towards the target, demonstrating a marked impairment with goal-directed attentional control. Surprisingly, older adults still made fewer fixations toward the distractor in comparison to non-targets, demonstrating that older adults sustained the ability to suppress irrelevant distractors. These findings raise important questions on the mechanisms that underlie increased distractibility in aging and oculomotor attentional control.

How Does Threat Modulate the Motivational Effects of Reward on Attention?

Studies on attentional bias have overwhelmingly focused on the priority of different stimuli and have rarely manipulated the state of the observer. Recently, the threat of unpredictable shock has been utilized to experimentally induce anxiety and investigate how negative arousal modulates attentional control. Experimentally induced anxiety has been shown to reduce the attentional priority afforded to reward-related stimuli while enhancing the efficiency of goal-directed attentional control. It is unclear which of these two influences might dominate when attending to reward-related stimuli is consistent with task goals and by extension what the scope of the modulatory influence of threat on attention is. In contrast to paradigms in the visual domain, a novel auditory identification task has demonstrated a robust influence of target-value associations on selective attention. In the present study, we examined how the threat of shock modulates the influence of learned value on voluntary attention. In both threat and no-threat conditions, we replicate prior findings of voluntary prioritization of reward-associated sounds. However, unlike in studies measuring involuntary attentional capture, threat did not modulate the influence of reward on attention. Our findings highlight important limitations to when and how threat modulates the control of attention, contextualizing prior findings.

COCO-Search18 fixation dataset for predicting goal-directed attention control

Attention control is a basic behavioral process that has been studied for decades. The currently best models of attention control are deep networks trained on free-viewing behavior to predict bottom-up attention control – saliency. We introduce COCO-Search18, the first dataset of laboratory-quality goal-directed behavior large enough to train deep-network models. We collected eye-movement behavior from 10 people searching for each of 18 target-object categories in 6202 natural-scene images, yielding sim 300,000 search fixations. We thoroughly characterize COCO-Search18, and benchmark it using three machine-learning methods: a ResNet50 object detector, a ResNet50 trained on fixation-density maps, and an inverse-reinforcement-learning model trained on behavioral search scanpaths. Models were also trained/tested on images transformed to approximate a foveated retina, a fundamental biological constraint. These models, each having a different reliance on behavioral training, collectively comprise the new state-of-the-art in predicting goal-directed search fixations. Our expectation is that future work using COCO-Search18 will far surpass these initial efforts, finding applications in domains ranging from human-computer interactive systems that can anticipate a person’s intent and render assistance to the potentially early identification of attention-related clinical disorders (ADHD, PTSD, phobia) based on deviation from neurotypical fixation behavior.

Predicting Goal-directed Attention Control Using Inverse-Reinforcement Learning.

Understanding how goals control behavior is a question ripe for interrogation by new methods from machine learning. These methods require large and labeled datasets to train models. To annotate a large-scale image dataset with observed search fixations, we collected 16,184 fixations from people searching for either microwaves or clocks in a dataset of 4,366 images (MS-COCO). We then used this behaviorally-annotated dataset and the machine learning method of inverse-reinforcement learning (IRL) to learn target-specific reward functions and policies for these two target goals. Finally, we used these learned policies to predict the fixations of 60 new behavioral searchers (clock = 30, microwave = 30) in a disjoint test dataset of kitchen scenes depicting both a microwave and a clock (thus controlling for differences in low-level image contrast). We found that the IRL model predicted behavioral search efficiency and fixation-density maps using multiple metrics. Moreover, reward maps from the IRL model revealed target-specific patterns that suggest, not just attention guidance by target features, but also guidance by scene context (e.g., fixations along walls in the search of clocks). Using machine learning and the psychologically meaningful principle of reward, it is possible to learn the visual features used in goal-directed attention control.

Distinguishing the neural mechanism of attentional control and working memory in feature-based attentive tracking.

Surface features are an important component in attentive tracking. However, the neural mechanisms underlying how features affect attentive tracking remain unknown. The present fMRI study addressed this issue by manipulating the intragroup feature complexity and intergroup feature similarity. In particular, this study distinguished the different neural mechanisms of intragroup feature complexity and intergroup feature similarity by investigating the roles of attentional control and working memory in dynamic feature-based attentive tracking. Behavioral and neuroimaging evidence showed that when targets are distinct from distractors, the intragroup feature complexity of the targets, rather than that of the distractors, mainly increases the visual working memory load and significantly activates the frontoparietal cortical circuit. Thus, the involvement of working memory in feature-based attentive tracking is modulated by goal-directed attention control. In addition, when targets are similar to distractors, the intergroup feature similarity (i.e., target-distractor similarity) mainly affects the allocation of attention. Specifically, target-distractor similarity affects the goal-directed attention toward the targets in a stimulus-driven way and induces an interaction between the ventral and dorsal attention networks.

Predicting Goal-directed Attention Control Using Inverse Reinforcement Learning and COCO-Search18

Predicting Goal-directed Attention Control Using Inverse Reinforcement Learning and COCO-Search18

Selection history is relative

Visual attention can be tuned to specific features to aid in visual search. The way in which these search strategies are established and maintained is flexible, reflecting goal-directed attentional control, but can exert a persistent effect on selection that remains even when these strategies are no longer advantageous, reflecting an attentional bias driven by selection history. Apart from feature-specific search, recent studies have shown that attention can be tuned to target-nontarget relationships. Here we tested whether a relational search strategy continues to bias attention in a subsequent task, where the relationally better color and former target color both serve as distractors (Experiment 1) or as potential targets (Experiment 2). We demonstrate that a relational bias can persist in a subsequent task in which color serves as a task-irrelevant feature, both impairing and facilitating visual search performance. Our findings extend our understanding of the relational account of attentional control and the nature of selection history effects on attention.

The influence of threat on the efficiency of goal-directed attentional control.

Anxiety has consistently been found to potentiate attentional capture by physically salient stimuli, which could be due to enhanced distractor processing, impaired goal-directed attention, or both. At the same time, a recent study demonstrated that a threat manipulation reduces attentional capture by reward-associated stimuli, suggesting that anxiety does not increase distractibility or, otherwise, interfere with the control of attention generally. Here, we experimentally induced anxiety via threat-of-shock in the adaptive choice visual search task to examine whether the experience of threat influences goal-directed attentional control. Participants chose to search through one of two task-relevant colors on each trial, where searching through the less abundant color would be optimal for maximizing performance. Performance was evaluated with and without the threat of unpredictable electric shock. Under threat, participants were more optimal in their visual search and missed fewer targets. Performance improvements were demonstrated on trials that the optimal target color switched, demonstrating that threat is beneficial in adapting to changing attentional demands. Our findings demonstrate that threat can facilitate the efficiency of goal-directed attentional control and are at odds with an antagonistic relationship between anxiety and the control of attention.

Modelling attention control using a convolutional neural network designed after the ventral visual pathway

ABSTRACTWe recently proposed that attention control uses object-category representations consisting of category-consistent features (CCFs), those features occurring frequently and consistently across a category’s exemplars [Yu, C.-P., Maxfield, J. T., & Zelinsky, G. J. (2016). Searching for category-consistent features: A computational approach to understanding visual category representation. Psychological Science, 27(6), 870–884.] Here we extracted from a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) designed after the primate ventral stream (VsNet) CCFs for 68 object categories spanning a three-level category hierarchy, and evaluated VsNet against the gaze behaviour of people searching for the same categorical targets. We also compared its success in predicting attention control to two other CNNs that differed in their degree and type of brain inspiration. VsNet not only replicated previous reports of stronger attention guidance to subordinate-level targets, but with its powerful CNN-CCFs it predicted attention control to individual target categories. Moreover, VsNet outperformed the other CNN models tested, despite these models having more trainable convolutional filters. We conclude that CCFs extracted from a brain-inspired CNN can predict goal-directed attention control.

Investigating the role of exogenous cueing on selection history formation.

An abundance of recent empirical data suggest that repeatedly allocating visual attention to task-relevant and/or reward-predicting features in the visual world engenders an attentional bias for these frequently attended stimuli, even when they become task irrelevant and no longer predict reward. In short, attentional selection in the past hinders voluntary control of attention in the present. But do such enduring attentional biases rely on a history of voluntary, goal-directed attentional selection, or can they be generated through involuntary, effortless attentional allocation? An abrupt visual onset triggers such a reflexive allocation of covert spatial attention to its location in the visual field, automatically modulating numerous aspects of visual perception. In this Registered Report, we asked whether a selection history that has been reflexively and involuntarily derived (i.e., through abrupt-onset cueing) also interferes with goal-directed attentional control, even in the complete absence of exogenous cues. To build spatially distinct histories of exogenous selection, we presented abrupt-onset cues twice as often at one of two task locations, and as expected, these cues reflexively modulated visual processing: task accuracy increased, and response times (RTs) decreased, when the cue appeared near the target's location, relative to that of the distractor. Upon removal of these cues, however, we found no evidence that exogenous selection history modulated task performance: task accuracy and RTs at the previously most-cued and previously least-cued sides were statistically indistinguishable. Thus, unlike voluntarily directed attention, involuntary attentional allocation may not be sufficient to engender historically contingent selection biases.

Greater Response Interference to Pain Faces Under Low Perceptual Load Conditions in Adolescents With Impairing Pain: A Role for Poor Attention Control Mechanisms in Pain Disability?

Persistent pain in young people in the community is common, but individuals vary in how much pain impacts daily life. Information-processing accounts of chronic pain partly attribute the fear and avoidance of pain, as well as associated interference, to a set of involuntary biases, including the preferential allocation of attention resources toward potential threats. Far less research has focused on the role of voluntary goal-directed attention control processes, the ability to flexibly direct attention toward and away from threats, in explaining pain-associated interference. Using a visual search task, we explored a poor attention control account of pain interference in young people with persistent pain from the community. One hundred and forty five young people aged 16 to 19 years were categorized into three groups: non-chronic pain (n = 68), low-interfering persistent pain (n = 40), and moderate- to high-interfering persistent pain (n = 22). We found that only adolescents with moderate-to high-interfering persistent pain but not the other two groups of adolescents were affected by a search task preceded by a pain face (compared to a neutral face), but this within-group difference emerged only under low perceptual load conditions. Because low perceptual load conditions are thought to require more strategic attention resources to suppress the interfering effects of pain face primes, our findings are consistent with a poor attention control account of pain interference in young people. Analyses further showed that these differences in task performance were not explained by confounding effects of anxiety. If replicated, these findings may have implications for understanding and managing the pain-associated disability in adolescents with chronic pain. PerspectiveYoung people with moderately and highly interfering pain responded slower on an easy search task after seeing a pain face than after seeing a neutral face. If replicated, these findings could mean that boosting the ability to control attention toward and away from threatening cues is an effective strategy for managing interference from pain.

Characterizing individual variation in the strategic use of attentional control.

Goal-directed attentional control can substanially aid visual search, but only if it is recruited in an effective manner. Previously we found that strategies chosen to control attention vary considerably across individuals, and we proposed that effort avoidance may lead some individuals to choose suboptimal strategies. Here we present a more thorough analysis of individual differences in attentional control strategies. We used the adaptive choice visual search, which provides a method to quantify an individual's attentional control strategy in a dynamically changing, unconstrained environment. We found that individual's strategy choices are highly reliable across sessions, suggesting that attentional control strategies are stable and trait-like. In Experiment 2, we explored the extent to which strategy use was related to subjective evaluations of effort and performance. Results showed that the extent to which individuals found the optimal strategy to be effortful and effective predicted their likelihood of making optimal choices on a subsequent choice block. These results provide the first evidence for a relationship between effort and strategic attentional control, and they highlight the important and often neglected role of strategy in understanding attentional control. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Toward a profile of goal-directed attentional control

Toward a profile of goal-directed attentional control

Choosing attentional control settings in a dynamically changing environment.

Goal-directed attentional control supports efficient visual search by prioritizing relevant stimuli in the environment. Previous research has shown that goal-directed control can be configured in many ways, and often multiple control settings can be used to achieve the same goal. However, little is known about how control settings are selected. We explored the extent to which the configuration of goal-directed control is driven by performance maximization (optimally configuring settings to maximize speed and accuracy) and effort minimization (selecting the least effortful settings). We used a new paradigm, adaptive choice visual search, which allows participants to choose one of two available targets (a red or a blue square) on each trial. Distractor colors vary predictively across trials, such that the optimal target switches back and forth throughout the experiment. Results (N = 43) show that participants chose the optimal target most often, updating to the new target when the environment changed, supporting performance maximization. However, individuals were sluggish to update to the optimal color, consistent with effort minimization. Additionally, we found a surprisingly high rate of nonoptimal choices and switching between targets, which could not be explained by either factor. Analysis of participants' self-reported search strategy revealed substantial individual differences in the control strategies used. In sum, the adaptive choice visual search enables a fresh approach to studying goal-directed control. The results contribute new evidence that control is partly determined by both performance maximization and effort minimization, as well as at least one additional factor, which we speculate to include novelty seeking.

Executive control of stimulus-driven and goal-directed attention in visual working memory.

We examined the role of executive control in stimulus-driven and goal-directed attention in visual working memory using probed recall of a series of objects, a task that allows study of the dynamics of storage through analysis of serial position data. Experiment 1 examined whether executive control underlies goal-directed prioritization of certain items within the sequence. Instructing participants to prioritize either the first or final item resulted in improved recall for these items, and an increase in concurrent task difficulty reduced or abolished these gains, consistent with their dependence on executive control. Experiment 2 examined whether executive control is also involved in the disruption caused by a post-series visual distractor (suffix). A demanding concurrent task disrupted memory for all items except the most recent, whereas a suffix disrupted only the most recent items. There was no interaction when concurrent load and suffix were combined, suggesting that deploying selective attention to ignore the distractor did not draw upon executive resources. A final experiment replicated the independent interfering effects of suffix and concurrent load while ruling out possible artifacts. We discuss the results in terms of a domain-general episodic buffer in which information is retained in a transient, limited capacity privileged state, influenced by both stimulus-driven and goal-directed processes. The privileged state contains the most recent environmental input together with goal-relevant representations being actively maintained using executive resources.

Rewards shape attentional search modes

Visual attention can be configured for specific stimulus features (feature search mode) or it can be non-specifically set for salient pop-outs (singleton detection mode). Additionally, monetary rewards have been shown to bias attention toward specific features, but it is unknown whether secondary reinforcers (images of US$) can shape global attention via search modes. In a between-group study, we trained participants to value one search mode over the other. In a testing phase, a salient distractor captured the attention of the value-singleton group; however, the value feature group was completely unaffected. This suggests that rewards automatically bias global attention mechanisms and potentially mediate the handoff between stimulus-driven and goal-directed attentional control.

Establishment of an attentional set via statistical learning.

The ability to overcome attentional capture and attend goal-relevant information is typically viewed as a volitional, effortful process that relies on the maintenance of current task priorities or "attentional sets" in working memory. However, the visual system possesses statistical learning mechanisms that can incidentally encode probabilistic associations between goal-relevant objects and the attributes likely to define them. Thus, it is possible that statistical learning may contribute to the establishment of a given attentional set and modulate the effects of attentional capture. Here we provide evidence for such a mechanism, showing that implicitly learned associations between a search target and its likely color directly influence the ability of a salient color precue to capture attention in a classic attentional capture task. This indicates a novel role for statistical learning in the modulation of attentional capture, and emphasizes the role that this learning may play in goal-directed attentional control more generally.

Neural Mechanisms of Attentional Control Differentiate Trait and State Negative Affect

The present research examined the hypothesis that cognitive processes are modulated differentially by trait and state negative affect (NA). Brain activation associated with trait and state NA was measured by fMRI during an attentional control task, the emotion-word Stroop. Performance on the task was disrupted only by state NA. Trait NA was associated with reduced activity in several regions, including a prefrontal area that has been shown to be involved in top-down, goal-directed attentional control. In contrast, state NA was associated with increased activity in several regions, including a prefrontal region that has been shown to be involved in stimulus-driven aspects of attentional control. Results suggest that NA has a significant impact on cognition, and that state and trait NA disrupt attentional control in distinct ways.