Conditions Of Inattention Research Articles

Synchronous citizen science with dogs

Citizen science approaches have grown in popularity over the years, partly due to their ability to reach a wider audience and produce more generalizable samples. In dogs, these studies, though, have been limited in their controls over materials or experimental protocols, with guardians typically reporting results without researcher supervision. Over two studies, we explored and validated a synchronous citizen science approach. We had dog guardians act as experimenters while being supervised by a researcher over Zoom. In study 1, we demonstrated that synchronous citizen science produced equivalent levels of performance to in-lab designs in a choice task. Consistent with past in-lab research, dogs selected a treat (vs. an empty plate) in a two-alternative forced-choice task. In study 2, we showed that Zoom methods are also appropriate for studies utilizing looking time measures. We explored dogs’ looking behaviors when a bag of treats was placed in an unreachable location, and dogs’ guardians were either attentive or inattentive while dogs attempted to retrieve the treats. Consistent with past work, dogs in the attentive condition looked at their guardian for longer periods and had a shorter latency to first look than dogs in the inattentive condition. Overall, we have demonstrated that synchronous citizen science studies with dogs are feasible and produce valid results consistent with those found in a typical lab setting.

Implementation of a Multi-Site Digitally-Enhanced School Clinician Training and ADHD/ODD Intervention Program in Mexico: Randomized Controlled Trial of CLS-R-FUERTE

Childhood conditions of inattention and disruptive behavior, such as Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), are prevalent but undertreated worldwide. One promising solution is harnessing digital technology to enhance school clinician training and ADHD/ODD intervention programs. We conducted a school-clustered randomized controlled trial of CLS-R-FUERTE: a program featuring training/consultation for school clinicians to deliver a six-week intervention comprised of weekly parent and student skills groups, as well as support teachers’ classroom management in the form of a Daily Report Card, all facilitated by electronic program manuals/materials and videoconferencing. A total of N = 163 (n = 6–8 students/school [ages 6–12] and their parents, teachers, and school clinicians) participated across eight public schools in Sinaloa, Mexico. We randomly assigned four schools to receive CLS-R-FUERTE immediately and four schools to receive school services as usual. We compared groups post-treatment on parent- and teacher-rated ADHD/ODD and impairment. We observed the program implementation in vivo, tracking trainer and school clinician program fidelity, as well as participant attendance and adherence, to evaluate feasibility. We also collected participant ratings of satisfaction and usability on the System Usability Scale to evaluate acceptability. Our CLS-R-FUERTE trial demonstrated high rates of program feasibility and acceptability comparable to prior in-person program trial findings. Students receiving CLS-R-FUERTE showed greater improvement in parent- and teacher-rated ADHD, as well as parent-rated ODD and impairment, compared to students receiving school services as usual. Results support the utility of global digital mental health programs training school clinicians to implement ADHD/ODD interventions, which have the potential to increase evidence-based treatment access and uptake across worldwide contexts.

Isolating the Neural Substrates of Visually Guided Attention Orienting in Humans.

The neural processes that enable healthy humans to orient attention to sudden visual events are poorly understood because they are tightly intertwined with purely sensory processes. Here we isolated visually guided orienting activity from sensory activity using event-related potentials (ERPs). By recording ERPs to a lateral stimulus and comparing waveforms obtained under conditions of attention and inattention, we identified an early positive deflection over the ipsilateral visual cortex that was associated with the covert orienting of visual attention to the stimulus. Across five experiments with male and female adult participants, this ipsilateral visual orienting activity (VOA) could be distinguished from purely sensory-evoked activity and from other top-down spatial attention effects. The VOA was linked with behavioral measures of orienting, being significantly larger when the stimulus was detected rapidly than when it was detected more slowly, and its presence was independent of saccadic eye movements toward the targets. The VOA appears to be a specific neural index of the visually guided orienting of attention to a stimulus that appears abruptly in an otherwise uncluttered visual field.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The study of visual attention orienting has been an important impetus for the field of cognitive neuroscience. Seminal reaction-time studies demonstrated that a suddenly appearing visual stimulus attracts attention involuntarily, but the neural processes associated with visually guided attention orienting have been difficult to isolate because they are intertwined with sensory processes that trigger the orienting. Here, we disentangled orienting activity from sensory activity using scalp recordings of event-related electrical activity in the human brain. A specific neural index of visually guided attention orienting was identified. Surprisingly, whereas peripheral sensory stimulation is processed initially and predominantly by the contralateral visual cortex, this electrophysiological index of visual orienting was recorded over the cerebral hemisphere that was ipsilateral to the attention-capturing stimulus.

Variance misperception under skewed empirical noise statistics explains overconfidence in the visual periphery.

Perceptual confidence typically corresponds to accuracy. However, observers can be overconfident relative to accuracy, termed "subjective inflation." Inflation is stronger in the visual periphery relative to central vision, especially under conditions of peripheral inattention. Previous literature suggests inflation stems from errors in estimating noise (i.e., "variance misperception"). However, despite previous Bayesian hypotheses about metacognitive noise estimation, no work has systematically explored how noise estimation may critically depend on empirical noise statistics, which may differ across the visual field, with central noise distributed symmetrically but peripheral noise positively skewed. Here, we examined central and peripheral vision predictions from five Bayesian-inspired noise-estimation algorithms under varying usage of noise priors, including effects of attention. Models that failed to optimally estimate noise exhibited peripheral inflation, but only models that explicitly used peripheral noise priors-but used them incorrectly-showed increasing peripheral inflation under increasing peripheral inattention. Further, only one model successfully captured previous empirical results, which showed a selective increase in confidence in incorrect responses under performance reductions due to inattention accompanied by no change in confidence in correct responses; this was the model that implemented Bayesian estimation of peripheral noise, but using an (incorrect) symmetric rather than the correct positively skewed peripheral noise prior. Our findings explain peripheral inflation, especially under inattention, and suggest future experiments that might reveal the noise expectations used by the visual metacognitive system.

Neural Correlates of Perceptual Grouping Under Conditions of Inattention and Divided Attention.

Grouping local elements of the visual environment together is crucial for meaningful perception. While our attentional system facilitates perception, it is limited in that we are unaware of some aspects of our environment that can still influence how we experience it. In this study, the neural mechanisms underlying the Ponzo illusion were examined under inattention and divided-attention conditions using functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the brain regions responsible for accessing visual stimuli. A line discrimination task was performed in which two horizontal lines were superimposed on a background of black and white dots that, on occasion, induced the Ponzo illusion if perceptually grouped together. Our findings revealed activation for perceptual grouping in the frontal, parietal, and occipital regions of the brain and activation in the bilateral frontal, temporal, and cingulate gyrus in response to divided attention compared with inattention trials. A direct comparison between grouping and attention showed involvement of the right supramarginal gyrus in grouping specifically under conditions of inattention, suggesting that even during implicit grouping complex visual processing occurs. Given that much of the visual world is not represented in conscious perception, these findings provide crucial information about how we make sense of visual scenes in the world.

The effects of human attentional state on canine gazing behaviour: a comparison of free-ranging, shelter, and pet dogs.

The ability of animals to communicate using gaze is a rich area of research. How domestic dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) use and respond to the gaze of humans is an area of particular interest. This study examined how three groups of domestic dogs from different populations (free-ranging dogs, pet dogs, and shelter dogs) responded to a human during three attentional state conditions: when the human was making eye contact (attentive), when the human was turned away (inattentive), and when the human exited the testing area. We found that dogs from different populations differed in their gazing behaviour. Free-ranging dogs responded to the human's change in attentional state by looking significantly less at the human in the inattentive condition compared to the attentive condition. Pet and shelter dogs did not differ in their gazing behaviour between these conditions. However, they gazed significantly more at the human in both the inattentive and attentive conditions compared to the free-ranging dogs and also spent more time in the proximity of the experimenter. This study suggests that life experience plays an important role in how dogs respond to the attentional state of a human.

Dollars do not determine detection: Monetary value associated with unexpected objects does not affect the likelihood of inattentional blindness.

Conscious perception often fails when an object appears unexpectedly and our attention is focused elsewhere (inattentional blindness). Although various factors have been identified that modulate the likelihood of this failure of awareness, it is not clear whether the monetary reward value associated with an object can affect whether or not this object is detected under conditions of inattention. We hypothesised that unexpectedly appearing objects that contain a feature linked to high value, as established via reward learning in a previous task, would subsequently be detected more frequently than objects containing a feature linked to low value. A total of 537 participants first learned the association between a perceptual feature (colour) and subsequent reward values (high, low, or none reward). Afterwards, participants were randomly assigned to a static (Experiment 1) or dynamic (Experiment 2) inattentional blindness task including an unexpected object associated with high, low, or none reward. However, no significant effect of the previously learned value on the subsequent likelihood of detection was observed. We speculate that artificial monetary value, which is known to affect attentional capture, is not strong enough to determine whether or not an object is consciously perceived.

Gatecrashing the visual cocktail party: How visual and semantic similarity modulate the own name benefit in the attentional blink.

The "visual cocktail party effect" refers to superior report of a participant's own name, under conditions of inattention. An early selection account suggests this advantage stems from enhanced visual processing. A late selection account suggests the advantage occurs when semantic information allowing identification as one's own name is retrieved. In the context of inattentional blindness (IB), Mack and Rock showed that the advantage does not generalise to a minor modification of a participant's own name, despite extensive visual similarity, supporting the late selection account. This study applied the name modification manipulation in the context of the attentional blink (AB). Participants were presented with rapid streams of names and identified a white target name, while also reporting the presence of one of two possible probes. The probe names appeared either close (the third item following the target: Lag 3) or far in time from the target (the eighth item following the target: Lag 8). The results revealed a robust AB; reports of the probe were reduced at Lag 3 relative to Lag 8. The AB was also greatly reduced for the own name compared to another name-a visual cocktail party effect. In contrast to the findings of Mack and Rock for IB, the reduced AB extended to the modified own name. The results suggest different loci for the visual cocktail party effect in the AB (word recognition) compared to IB (semantic processing).

An epidemiological but invisibilized marker: indebtedness within an Afromexican town in Oaxaca

To explore indebtedness dynamics in an Afromexican town by an inclusive epidemiological approach. Qualitative study through 75 questionnaires, 20 interviews to depth and six focal groups in a support process to the Municipal Health Commission in Santiago Tapextla, Oaxaca. Catastrophic expenses due to insufficient medical care were the principal causal item. Indebtedness processes with patrimonial loss are dominant, generating dependence spirals of difficult resolution that impact the familiar dynamics and the pathology evolution. In spite of its inexistence within sanitary official programs, indebtedness dynamics constitute an epidemiological marker by the uncovering of structural inattention conditions that reflect the imposed, naturalized and pathogenic hierarchization proper of coloniality. To analyze this process at local and global levels is a complex but essential public health task.

Low attention impairs optimal incorporation of prior knowledge in perceptual decisions.

When visual attention is directed away from a stimulus, neural processing is weak and strength and precision of sensory data decreases. From a computational perspective, in such situations observers should give more weight to prior expectations in order to behave optimally during a discrimination task. Here we test a signal detection theoretic model that counter-intuitively predicts subjects will do just the opposite in a discrimination task with two stimuli, one attended and one unattended: when subjects are probed to discriminate the unattended stimulus, they rely less on prior information about the probed stimulus' identity. The model is in part inspired by recent findings that attention reduces trial-by-trial variability of the neuronal population response and that they use a common criterion for attended and unattended trials. In five different visual discrimination experiments, when attention was directed away from the target stimulus, subjects did not adjust their response bias in reaction to a change in stimulus presentation frequency despite being fully informed and despite the presence of performance feedback and monetary and social incentives. This indicates that subjects did not rely more on the priors under conditions of inattention as would be predicted by a Bayes-optimal observer model. These results inform and constrain future models of Bayesian inference in the human brain.

Gist perception requires attention

Four experiments (240 subjects) explored gist perception without attention using the Mack and Rock (1998) cross task. Twelve scenes were flashed under conditions of inattention, divided, and full attention. Subjects described what they saw on critical trials in which a scene was flashed with the cross. In Experiments 3 and 4 subjects also chose the scene from a four scene array. In Experiment 4 the critical scenes were shown twice in the inattention condition. Overall, only 17% reported gist in the inattention condition, 65% did so with divided, and 82% did so with full attention. In Experiment 4 most subjects remained inattentionally blind to the scenes even though they were shown twice, conditions which fostered repetition priming, and we found a suggestion of negative priming. The results of all 4 experiments indicate that gist requires attention.

The Impact of the Mode of Thought in Complex Decisions: Intuitive Decisions are Better

A number of recent studies have reported that decision quality is enhanced under conditions of inattention or distraction (unconscious thought; Dijksterhuis, 2004; Dijksterhuis and Nordgren, 2006; Dijksterhuis et al., 2006). These reports have generated considerable controversy, for both experimental (problems of replication) and theoretical reasons (interpretation). Here we report the results of four experiments. The first experiment replicates the unconscious thought effect, under conditions that validate and control the subjective criterion of decision quality. The second and third experiments examine the impact of a mode of thought manipulation (without distraction) on decision quality in immediate decisions. Here we find that intuitive or affective manipulations improve decision quality compared to analytic/deliberation manipulations. The fourth experiment combines the two methods (distraction and mode of thought manipulations) and demonstrates enhanced decision quality, in a situation that attempts to preserve ecological validity. The results are interpreted within a framework that is based on two interacting subsystems of decision-making: an affective/intuition based system and an analytic/deliberation system.

Processing Speed Weakness in Children and Adolescents with Non-Hyperactive but Inattentive ADHD (ADD)

DSM-IV-TR defines ADHD-Predominantly Inattentive as allowing up to five symptoms of hyperactivity/impulsivity, while theories of the inattentive type usually assume a group that is hypoactive and characterized by processing speed and cognitive interference deficits. In a community-recruited sample of 572 children and adolescents, a pure inattentive subtype of ADHD (ADD) was defined as those who met DSM-IV-TR criteria for ADHD-PI but had two or fewer hyperactive/impulsive symptoms. Processing and output speeds of those with ADD were compared to those identified with DSM-IV-TR ADHD combined type and non-ADHD controls. These results were then contrasted with those found when DSM-IV-TR defined ADHD-PI was compared with ADHD-C and controls. Processing and output speed were assessed with the Trailmaking A and B and the Stroop Naming Tests. Cognitive interference control was assessed with the interference score from the Stroop Task. Slower cognitive interference speed was found in the ADD vs. ADHD-C and controls comparisons, but not the ADHD-PI versus ADHD-C and controls comparisons. On output speed measures, ADD exhibited the slowest performance, significantly different from controls and the effect size for the set-shifting speed contrast (Trailmaking B) was double that of the ADHD-PI vs. control comparison. ADHD-Inattentive type as defined by the DSM-IV-TR is a heterogeneous condition with a meaningful proportion of those affected exhibiting virtually no hyperactive/impulsive symptoms. This subgroup may represent a distinct inattentive condition characterized by poor cognitive interference control and slow processing or output speed.

Fact or fiction? An event-related potential study of implicit emotion regulation

Emotion regulation can be achieved through a number of processes. Previous studies have investigated this issue by encouraging individuals to voluntarily change how they think about a situation in order to decrease its emotional impact. However, little is known about automatic regulation processes. The goal of the present study was to investigate whether an “implicit reappraisal strategy” would modulate the Late Positive Potential (LPP) associated to affective picture viewing. Unpleasant pictures, presented as distractors, were shown in two contexts in which a prior description presented them as taken from either movie scenes (fictitious) or real scenes. Results showed that the interference produced by unpleasant pictures under the real context, indexed by reaction time and LPP amplitude, was attenuated under the fictitious context. These results provide evidence for implicit down-regulation of the stimulus relevance during an inattention condition.

Grouping by color similarity, orientation similarity and collinearity under conditions of inattention

Grouping by color similarity, orientation similarity and collinearity under conditions of inattention

Perception and action under conditions of inattention

Perception and action under conditions of inattention

Differences in the neural basis of automatic auditory and visual time perception: ERP evidence from an across-modal delayed response oddball task

In our everyday lives, we need to process auditory and visual temporal information as efficiently as possible. Although automatic auditory time perception has been widely investigated using an index of the mismatch negativity (MMN), the neural basis of automatic visual time perception has been largely ignored. The present study investigated the automatic processing of auditory and visual time perception employing the cross-modal delayed response oddball paradigm. In the experimental condition, the standard stimulus was 200 ms and the deviant stimulus was 120 ms, which were exchanged in the control condition. Reaction time, accuracy, and event-related potential (ERP) data were measured when participants performed the duration discrimination task. The ERP results showed that the MMN, N2b, and P3 were elicited by an auditory deviant stimulus under the attention condition, while only the MMN was elicited under the inattention condition. The MMN was largest over the frontal and central sites, while the difference in MMN amplitude was not significant between under the attention and inattention condition. In contrast, the change-related positivity (CRP) and the visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) were elicited by the visual deviant stimulus under both the attention and inattention conditions. The CRP was largest over the occipito-temporal sites under the attention condition and over the fronto-central sites under the inattention condition. The difference in CRP amplitude was significant between the attention and inattention condition. The vMMN was largest over the parieto-occipital sites under the attention condition, and largest over the fronto-central sites under the inattention condition. The difference in vMMN amplitude was significant between the attention and inattention condition. Auditory MMN does not appear to be modulated by attention, whereas the visual CRP and the vMMN are modulated by attention. Therefore, the present study provides electrophysiological evidence for the existence of automatic visual time perception and supports an “attentional switch” hypothesis for a modality effect on duration judgments, such that auditory temporal information is processed relatively automatically, whereas visual temporal information processing requires controlled attention.

Male Attentional Bias for Female Faces

Event Abstract Back to Event Male Attentional Bias for Female Faces Yuka Okazaki1*, Arman Abrahamyan2, Catherine Stevens3 and Andreas A. Ioannides4 1 Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Netherlands 2 The University of Sydney, Australia 3 University of Western Sydney, Australia 4 AAI Scientific Cultural Services Ltd., Lab. for Human Brain Dynamics, Cyprus Under conditions of inattention or deficits in orienting attention, special classes of stimuli (e.g. faces, bodies) are more likely to be perceived than other stimuli. This suggests that biologically salient visual stimuli automatically recruit attention, even when they are task-irrelevant or ignored. Here we report results from a behavioral experiment with female and male subjects and two magnetoencephalography (MEG) experiments with male subjects only, in which we investigated attentional capture with face and hand stimuli. In both the behavioral and MEG experiments, subjects were required to count the number of gender-specific targets from either face or hand categories within a block of stimuli. In the behavioral experiment, we found that male subjects were significantly more accurate in response to female than male face target blocks. There was no corresponding effect found in response to hand target blocks. Female subjects did not show a gender-based difference in response to face or hand target blocks. MEG results indicated that the male subjects’ responses to face stimuli in primary visual cortex (V1) and the face-selective part of the fusiform gyrus (FG) were reduced when male face stimuli were not relevant to the task, whereas female faces maintained a strong response in these areas in both task-relevant and task-irrelevant conditions. These results suggest that within the male brain, female face stimuli are more resilient to suppression than male faces, once attention is drawn to the part of the visual field where the face appears. Conference: Biomag 2010 - 17th International Conference on Biomagnetism , Dubrovnik, Croatia, 28 Mar - 1 Apr, 2010. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Neurocognition and Functional Connectivity Citation: Okazaki Y, Abrahamyan A, Stevens C and Ioannides AA (2010). Male Attentional Bias for Female Faces. Front. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: Biomag 2010 - 17th International Conference on Biomagnetism . doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2010.06.00358 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 07 Apr 2010; Published Online: 07 Apr 2010. * Correspondence: Yuka Okazaki, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Nijmegen, Netherlands, y.okazaki@fcdonders.ru.nl Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Yuka Okazaki Arman Abrahamyan Catherine Stevens Andreas A Ioannides Google Yuka Okazaki Arman Abrahamyan Catherine Stevens Andreas A Ioannides Google Scholar Yuka Okazaki Arman Abrahamyan Catherine Stevens Andreas A Ioannides PubMed Yuka Okazaki Arman Abrahamyan Catherine Stevens Andreas A Ioannides Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

Wired for Her Face? Male Attentional Bias for Female Faces

Under conditions of inattention or deficits in orienting attention, special classes of stimuli (e.g. faces, bodies) are more likely to be perceived than other stimuli. This suggests that biologically salient visual stimuli automatically recruit attention, even when they are task-irrelevant or ignored. Here we report results from a behavioral experiment with female and male subjects and two magnetoencephalography (MEG) experiments with male subjects only, in which we investigated attentional capture with face and hand stimuli. In both the behavioral and MEG experiments, subjects were required to count the number of gender-specific targets from either face or hand categories within a block of stimuli. In the behavioral experiment, we found that male subjects were significantly more accurate in response to female than male face target blocks. There was no corresponding effect found in response to hand target blocks. Female subjects did not show a gender-based difference in response to face or hand target blocks. MEG results indicated that the male subjects’ responses to face stimuli in primary visual cortex (V1) and the face-selective part of the fusiform gyrus (FG) were reduced when male face stimuli were not relevant to the task, whereas female faces maintained a strong response in these areas in both task-relevant and task-irrelevant conditions. These results suggest that within the male brain, female face stimuli are more resilient to suppression than male faces, once attention is drawn to the part of the visual field where the face appears.

Activity in Face-Responsive Brain Regions is Modulated by Invisible, Attended Faces: Evidence from Masked Priming

It is often assumed that neural activity in face-responsive regions of primate cortex correlates with conscious perception of faces. However, whether such activity occurs without awareness is still debated. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in conjunction with a novel masked face priming paradigm, we observed neural modulations that could not be attributed to perceptual awareness. More specifically, we found reduced activity in several classic face-processing regions, including the “fusiform face area,” “occipital face area,” and superior temporal sulcus, when a face was preceded by a briefly flashed image of the same face, relative to a different face, even when 2 images of the same face differed. Importantly, unlike most previous studies, which have minimized awareness by using conditions of inattention, the present results occurred when the stimuli (the primes) were attended. By contrast, when primes were perceived consciously, in a long-lag priming paradigm, we found repetition-related activity increases in additional frontal and parietal regions. These data not only demonstrate that fMRI activity in face-responsive regions can be modulated independently of perceptual awareness, but also document where such subliminal face-processing occurs (i.e., restricted to face-responsive regions of occipital and temporal cortex) and to what extent (i.e., independent of the specific image).