Limited Attentional Capacity Research Articles

Unraveling interlanguage variability: A psycholinguistic exploration of morphological forms in Iranian ESL learners' written performance

The present research study aimed to investigate the psycholinguistic aspects of interlanguage (IL) variability in English as a second language learners from Iran. Three morphological forms were specifically examined in this study: the plural "-s," past tense forms, and present tense forms. In order to investigate the learners' cognitive processes, the researchers used a mixed-method approach, combining qualitative semi-structured interviews with quantitative analysis of written task performance. Under various task conditions, learners exhibited two opposing patterns of IL variability (increasing and decreasing) in their morphological forms. Various degrees of accuracy were noted for every kind of morpheme. Different students allocated their attention differently to form and meaning in both under pressure and relaxed task environments. The observed variations could have been caused by limited working memory and attention capacity in addition to L1 transfer. The research indicated that the field of second language acquisition could benefit from an explanatory approach to comprehend IL variability from the learner's perspective. It provides recommendations for larger-scale research projects in a variety of educational contexts, along with pedagogical implications.

Shifting Focus with HCEye: Exploring the Dynamics of Visual Highlighting and Cognitive Load on User Attention and Saliency Prediction

Visual highlighting can guide user attention in complex interfaces. However, its effectiveness under limited attentional capacities is underexplored. This paper examines the joint impact of visual highlighting (permanent and dynamic) and dual-task-induced cognitive load on gaze behaviour. Our analysis, using eye-movement data from 27 participants viewing 150 unique webpages reveals that while participants' ability to attend to UI elements decreases with increasing cognitive load, dynamic adaptations (i.e., highlighting) remain attention-grabbing. The presence of these factors significantly alters what people attend to and thus what is salient. Accordingly, we show that state-of-the-art saliency models increase their performance when accounting for different cognitive loads. Our empirical insights, along with our openly available dataset, enhance our understanding of attentional processes in UIs under varying cognitive (and perceptual) loads and open the door for new models that can predict user attention while multitasking.

The Effect of Different Dual-Task Balance Training Methods on Balance and Cognitive Function of Older Adults

Background: This research aims to investigate the effectiveness of different dual-task training methods on balance and cognitive function in the elderly. Methods: The participants in this study were 36 elderly individuals aged 65 years and older who met the research entry criteria. The selected individuals were divided into three groups, 12 people each, based on the pre-test Berg balance scores. The research groups included two dual-task balance training groups, one with fixed and one with variable priority, and a control group. The Berg balance test was used to assess functional balance in the elderly, and the serial reaction time test was used to assess cognitive function. Data analysis was conducted using covariance analysis and the Bonferroni post hoc test. Results: The data analysis showed no significant difference between the control group and the dual task groups with fixed and variable priority in the balance test. The serial reaction time test results indicated a significant difference between the control group and the dual-task practice groups with fixed and variable priority. Moreover, there was a significant difference between the two dual-task practice groups post-intervention. Conclusion: This research demonstrated that dual-task training, particularly with variable priority, resulted in faster information processing in the elderly. Therefore, it appears that, in addition to the theory of limited attention capacity, other mechanisms, such as the allocated attentional ability, can effectively impact cognitive performance.

More knowledge, better innovation? Role of knowledge breadth and depth

PurposeCurrent open innovation (OI) and external knowledge search (EKS) research primarily shows a positive linear relationship between EKS and innovation at an individual level. However, organizational scholarship argues that excessive EKS may harm innovation. This study combines the knowledge-based view (KBV) and attention-based view (ABV) to articulate a nonlinear theory of EKS and innovation at the individual level.Design/methodology/approachThe authors constructed a multi-sourced dataset covering 59,798 USA pharmaceutical patents spanning from 1975 to 2014 and employed negative binomial fixed-effect models to examine theoretical hypotheses.FindingsWe find a significant concave curvilinear relationship between EKS and innovation quantity as well as innovation quality at an individual level. An individual’s knowledge breadth and depth moderate the relationship between EKS and innovation, such that the threshold at which EKS has diminishing returns for individual innovation is higher for inventors with a broad range of knowledge and those with deeper expertise in the domain where they are innovating.Research limitations/implicationsManagers should guide inventors toward a moderate investment of time and effort in EKS and should caution against over searching. Besides, managers should recognize that an inventor’s capacity for EKS is determined in part by their breadth of knowledge across various domains as well as the depth of knowledge they have in the knowledge domain where they are innovating.Practical implicationsWe provide both parties with a clearer understanding of when EKS can begin to deteriorate an individual’s innovation performance why that deterioration occurs, and we also highlight two individual-level knowledge characteristics to take into consideration when deciding when to cease the EKS process.Social implicationsThis study provides a novel holistic understanding of OI and knowledge management for policymakers and organizations to nourish innovation dynamism and make the best of knowledge stocks in the community, which in turn will create endless power for sustainable social change and inclusive development.Originality/valueThis study contributes to OI theory by highlighting the non-linear nature of the relationship between EKS and innovation on an individual level. This represents a fundamental shift in theory on EKS and individual innovation by suggesting a major rethinking of how the two concepts relate, revealing the dark side of EKS in knowledge management if inventors engage in excessive EKS. Likewise, our study’s incorporation of the ABV informs KBV scholarship by highlighting the role of the limited attentional capacity of individuals in firm knowledge management.

Remembering in the Digital World: Autobiographical Memory in Social Media

The use of social media continues to increase in modern cultures in recent years. This new context leads to creating a virtual self, which somewhat differs from the real self. Further, social relations are set and maintained predominantly in this new context. There is no doubt that social media does not only affect individuals' social relations but also their cognitive skills by pulling them into new situations that they are unfamiliar with. In this new context, content coded in social media can be remembered in real life, and content coded in real life can be remembered in social media. This new context, where mostly real-life stories are shared, is likely to strongly affect the autobiographical memory processes of individuals. Past research suggests that social media affects autobiographical memory processes both directly (phenomenological characteristics, functions) and indirectly through cognitive processes (eg, attention, working memory, transitive memory). Studies about its indirect effects indicate that people with limited attention and working memory capacity have difficulty processing the high number of stimuli offered by social media. Given that the long-term memory capacity is not limited, it is plausible to expect that some of the contents are encoded into the memory; however, problems may occur in the storage and retrieval processes. Studies about the direct effect of social media show that the phenomenological characteristics (number of details, accuracy, emotional content) and functions (self, social, directing, therapeutic) of events experienced or shared on social media differ from real-life events. This theoretical review discusses the effects of social media use on cognitive processes related to memory processes and more specifically on the phenomenological and functional characteristics of autobiographical memory. To recognize and prevent potential psychological issues that may emerge in relation to this new setting, it appears essential to comprehend how social media affects autobiographical memory, which is essential for self-perception.

Visual Complexity of Head-Up Display in Automobiles Modulates Attentional Tunneling.

To investigate how the visual complexity of head-up displays (HUDs) influence the allocation of driver's attention in two separate visual domains (near and far domains). The types and amount of information displayed on automobile HUDs have increased. With limited human attention capacity, increased visual complexity in the near domain may lead to interference in the effective processing of information in the far domain. Near-domain and far-domain vision were separately tested using a dual-task paradigm. In a simulated road environment, 62 participants were to control the speed of the vehicle (SMT; near domain) and manually respond to probes (PDT; far domain) simultaneously. Five HUD complexity levels including a HUD-absent condition were presented block-wise. Near domain performance was not modulated by the HUD complexity levels. However, the far domain detection accuracies were impaired as the HUD complexity level increased, with greater accuracy differences observed between central and peripheral probes. Increased HUD visual complexity leads to a biased deployment of driver attention toward the central visual field. Therefore, the formulation of HUD designs must be preceded by an in-depth investigation of the dynamics of human cognition. To ensure driving safety, HUD designs should be rendered with minimal visual complexity by incorporating only essential information relevant to driving and removing driving-irrelevant or additional visual details.

Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens

Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. We argue that digital information literacy must include the competence of critical ignoring—choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities. We review three types of cognitive strategies for implementing critical ignoring: self-nudging, in which one ignores temptations by removing them from one’s digital environments; lateral reading, in which one vets information by leaving the source and verifying its credibility elsewhere online; and the do-not-feed-the-trolls heuristic, which advises one to not reward malicious actors with attention. We argue that these strategies implementing critical ignoring should be part of school curricula on digital information literacy. Teaching the competence of critical ignoring requires a paradigm shift in educators’ thinking, from a sole focus on the power and promise of paying close attention to an additional emphasis on the power of ignoring. Encouraging students and other online users to embrace critical ignoring can empower them to shield themselves from the excesses, traps, and information disorders of today’s attention economy.

Recast, Task Complexity and Child Learners’ L2 Development

This paper investigated how production task combined with teacher feedback (in the form of recasts) affects child second language development, and the effects of task complexity on their production performance. 92 child learners of English in three intact classes were assigned to three tasks of different complexity (simple, +complex, ++complex). In response to errors in the use of the present third person singular verb forms, participants received the feedback of recasts. L2 development was measured through oral production and written tests. Results show that recasts are effective for learning the target form, and there is a negative correlation between task complexity and child learners’ acquisition of linguistic target in their written production, but no significant correlation was found between task complexity and participants’ oral production. The results confirm Skehan’s limited attention capacity prediction, and can be explained from the cognitive development level of the participants and their English learning habits. Implications for pedagogy and future research are discussed.

Unequal allocation of overt and covert attention in Multiple Object Tracking

In many real-life contexts, where objects are moving around, we are often required to allocate our attention unequally between targets or regions of different importance. However, typical multiple object tracking (MOT) tasks, primarily investigate equal attention allocation as the likelihood of each target being probed is the same. In two experiments, we investigated whether participants can allocate attention unequally across regions of the visual field, using a MOT task where two regions were probed with either a high and low or with equal priority. Experiment 1 showed that for high-priority regions, accuracy (for direction of heading judgments) improved, and participants had more frequent and longer fixations in that region compared with a low-priority region. Experiment 2 showed that eye movements were functional in that they slightly improved accuracy when participants could freely move their eyes compared with when they had to centrally fixate. Replicating Experiment 1, we found better tracking performance for high compared with low-priority regions, in both the free and fixed viewing conditions, but the benefit was greater for the free viewing condition. Although unequal attention allocation is possible without eye movements, eye movements seem to improve tracking ability, presumably by allowing participants to fixate more in the high-priority region and get a better, foveal view of the objects. These findings can help us better understand how observers in real-life settings (e.g., CCTV monitoring, driving) can use their limited attentional capacity to allocate their attention unequally in a demand-based manner across different tracking regions.

The Unfolding of Cognitive Effort During Sentence Processing: Pupillometric Evidence From People With and Without Aphasia.

Arousal and cognitive effort are relevant yet often overlooked components of attention during language processing. Pupillometry can be used to provide a psychophysiological index of arousal and cognitive effort. Given that much is unknown regarding the relationship between cognition and language deficits seen in people with aphasia (PWA), pupillometry may be uniquely suited to explore those relationships. The purpose of this study was to examine arousal and the time course of the allocation of cognitive effort related to sentence processing in people with and without aphasia. Nineteen PWA and age- and education-matched control participants listened to relatively easy (subject-relative) and relatively difficult (object-relative) sentences and were required to answer occasional comprehension questions. Tonic and phasic pupillary responses were used to index arousal and the unfolding of cognitive effort, respectively, while sentences were processed. Group differences in tonic and phasic responses were examined. Group differences were observed for both tonic and phasic responses. PWA exhibited greater overall arousal throughout the task compared with controls, as evidenced by larger tonic pupil responses. Controls exhibited more effort (greater phasic responses) for difficult compared with easy sentences; PWA did not. Group differences in phasic responses were apparent during end-of-sentence and postsentence time windows. Results indicate that the attentional state of PWA in this study was not consistently supportive of adequate task engagement. PWA in our sample may have relatively limited attentional capacity or may have challenges with allocating existing capacity in ways that support adequate task engagement and performance. This work adds to the body of evidence supporting the validity of pupillometric tasks for the study of aphasia and contributes to a better understanding of the nature of language deficits in aphasia. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.16959376.

The "100,000+ Clicks" Dream Comes True: A Study on the Click-and-Read Behavior of WeChat Tweets From the Perspective of Emotional Expression.

An in-depth and refined empirical study on the emotional expression of information and the information processing mechanism of audiences is carried out to provide enterprises and other organizations with insights and references as regard to the effective utilization of WeChat Tweets for information dissemination and marketing purposes. Based on 1,465 actual tweets from two different types of WeChat public accounts (knowledge communication and information releasing), this paper applies the limited attention capacity model and the signaling theory to analyze the influence of emotional presence, emotional complexity, emotional intensity, and emotional polarity of tweet titles on the click-and-read behavior of the audience. The results show that for WeChat public accounts serving the purpose of knowledge communication, emotional presence and emotional complexity of tweet titles, as well as the emotional intensity of positive tweet titles, has no significant effect on the click-and-read behaviors of the audience. Besides, the emotional intensity of negative tweet titles has a significant negative impact on the audience’s click-and-read behaviors. While for WeChat public accounts serving the purpose of information releasing, tweet titles with emotional presence and lower level of emotional complexity are more likely to trigger click-and-read behaviors of audiences; emotional intensity of negative tweet titles has no significant effect on the click-and-read behaviors of audiences, and emotional intensity of positive tweet titles has a significant negative impact on the audience’s click-and-read behaviors. Thus, this study further analyzes the influence of emotional factors, such as emotional existence, emotional complexity, emotional intensity, and emotional polarity of tweet titles on the click-and-read behavior of consumers and further explores the emotional information processing mechanism of WeChat tweet readers.

Factors associated with cognitive failure among mothers involved in child care

Mothers involved in child care may be prone to various cognitive failures (e.g., leaving things behind) as a result of being overburdened with maternal duties, with limited attentional capacity for responding to children’s frequent demands. Therefore, this study aimed to explore factors associated with cognitive failure among mothers involved in child care in Japan. The participants were 310 mothers aged 25–45 (155 full-time workers, 155 housewives). The self-reported questionnaire covered cognitive failure (outcome variable), basic demographic characteristics, sociological factors, health status, and personality. Cognitive failure was assessed using the 15-item Japanese version of the Short Inventory of Minor Lapses. The variables evaluated for potential associations with cognitive failure included mother’s age, youngest child’s age, number of children, employment status, daily sleep duration, time spent on leisure activities, fatigue, social support (instrumental and emotional), use of child care services, and the Big Five personality traits (neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness). Multiple regression analysis showed that number of children, fatigue, emotional support, neuroticism, agreeableness, and conscientiousness were independently and significantly associated with cognitive failure. Our results may help facilitate the development of effective strategies to prevent adverse effects on children’s and parents’ health by preventing cognitive failure among mothers.

Market Response to Macroeconomic Announcements under Optimal Attention Allocation: Theory and Evidence

I develop a model of investor behavior around prescheduled macroeconomic announcements. My model analyzes the optimal allocation of investor attention between systematic and idiosyncratic risk factors when a macroeconomic announcement is anticipated. Skilled investors, when producing information under a limited attention capacity, optimally allocate more of their attention to analyzing the idiosyncratic risk factor when they anticipate more precise public information about the systematic risk factor from the macroeconomic announcement. Consequently, my model predicts that, the more informative (precise) the macroeconomic announcement is expected to be about the underlying risk factors, ceteris paribus, the more uncertainty pre-announcement, the more resolution of uncertainty post-announcement, and the higher the trading volume around the announcement on the market index. My empirical analysis of trading by investors around both FOMC and CPI announcements support my model's predictions. In particular, my empirical findings are consistent with model predictions about the effect of the anticipated macroeconomic announcement precision on investor attention allocation, the effect of investor attention on the levels of pre-announcement and post-announcement trading volumes, and the effect of investor attention on the ratio of post-announcement trading volume over the pre-announcement trading volume.

Information policies and biased cost perceptions - The case of Swedish residential energy consumption

Households typically receive utility bills where all electricity use during a fixed period is lumped together. The lack of direct feedback in the form of marginal costs of using specific electric appliances potentially leads to mistakes in households' decision-making because of biased cost perceptions. In this paper, we test the commonly held notion that lack of relevant energy-related knowledge results in cost underestimation of using electric appliances that may lead to over-consumption of energy. Contrary to this notion, our results show that less knowledgeable energy consumers tend to have higher cost perceptions than others. This finding implies that less knowledgeable energy consumers may consume too little of energy. We also find that a substantial share of the sampled households, in particular less knowledgeable energy consumers, are less willing to receive relevant cost-free information about their energy use and costs. This finding suggests that poor energy-related knowledge may not only be a matter of high information search and processing costs, but also a matter of consumers’ limited attention capacity.

An investigation of how relative precision of target encoding influences metacognitive performance

Detection failures in perceptual tasks can result from different causes: sometimes we may fail to see something because perceptual information is noisy or degraded, and sometimes we may fail to see something due to the limited capacity of attention. Previous work indicates that metacognitive capacities for detection failures may differ depending on the specific stimulus visibility manipulation employed. In this investigation, we measured metacognition while matching performance in two visibility manipulations: phase-scrambling and the attentional blink. As in previous work, metacognitive asymmetries emerged: despite matched type 1 performance, metacognitive ability (measured by area under the ROC curve) for reporting stimulus absence was higher in the attentional blink condition, which was mainly driven by metacognitive ability in correct rejection trials. We performed Signal Detection Theoretic (SDT) modeling of the results, showing that differences in metacognition under equal type I performance can be explained when the variance of the signal and noise distributions are unequal. Specifically, the present study suggests that phase scrambling signal trials have a wider distribution (more variability) than attentional blink signal trials, leading to a larger area under the ROC curve for attentional blink trials where subjects reported stimulus absence. These results provide a theoretical basis for the origin of metacognitive differences on trials where subjects report stimulus absence, and may also explain previous findings where the absence of evidence during detection tasks results in lower metacognitive performance when compared to categorization.

Potential Motor Benefits of Visual Feedback of Error Reduction for Older Adults.

This study investigated how visual feedback of virtual error reduction (ER) modified the visuomotor performance of older adults with limited attentional capacity. Error structures of young and older adults during birhythmic force tracking were contrasted when the visualized error size was exact or half of the actual size. As compared with full-size error feedback, ER feedback improved the force tracking symmetry of older adults, but undermined that of young adults. Extended Poincaré analysis revealed that young adults presented greater short-term error variability (mean value of κ-lagged SD1 of the error signal) with ER feedback, which led to a smaller mean value of κ-lagged SD1 of the error signal for older adults. The ER-related task improvement of the older adults was negatively correlated with the size of the tracking errors with real error feedback and positively correlated with ER-related increases in force spectral symmetry and decreases in the mean value of κ-lagged SD1 of the error signal. ER feedback could advance visuomotor tasks for older adults who perform worse with full-size visual feedback by the enhancement of self-efficacy and stabilization of negative internal feedback.

A Haptic-Based Perception-Empathy Biofeedback System with Vibration Transition: Verifying the Attention Amount.

In this paper, a perception-empathy biofeedback (PEBF) system is proposed that supplements the foot pressure status of a paralyzed foot with a wearable vibrotactile biofeedback (BF) vest to the back. Improvements in the ankle dorsiflexion and push-off movement in the swing phase and pre-swing phase, respectively, can be expected after using the proposed system. However, the results of the 3 week pilot clinical tests suggest that significant improvement is only observed for the push-off movement. It is assumed that the attention required to recognize the BF was beyond the ability of the patients. In this paper, a dual task (40 s walking and performing mental arithmetic at the same time) was conducted with the following conditions: no vibrations and providing BF to the lower back and the entire back. According to the results, the ankle joint angle of the paralyzed side at push-off under the entire back condition is statistically significant (p = 0.0780); however, there are no significant changes under the lower back condition (p = 0.4998). Moreover, the ankle joint angle of the paralyzed side at the initial contact is statistically significant with respect to the lower back condition (p = 0.0233) and shows a significant trend for the entire back condition (p = 0.0730). The results suggest that the limited attention capacity of hemiplegic patients fails to improve both dorsiflexion and push-off movements; moreover, ankle motion can be promoted if attention is concentrated on recognizing focalized vibratory feedback patterns.

Conditions and Tasks : The Effects of Planning and Task Complexity on L2 Speaking

Motivated by different notion of task criteria in the Limited Attention Capacity Hypothesis and the Cognition Hypothesis, the purpose of this study is to investigate how planning and task complexity affect second language (L2) learners’ spoken performance. The study’s motivation is as follows: 1) the effects of online planning (as task condition) and task complexity (as task characteristics) and their interactions were examined; and 2) instead of repeated and redundant measures for complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF), multi-layered CAF measure indices were used to capture a careful performance. The study’s subjects were 77 undergraduates divided into four groups: no planning in simple task, no planning in complex task, online planning in simple task, and online planning in complex task. Online planning was modified from Yuan and Ellis’s (2003) and Wang’s (2009) studies, while task complexity was manipulated by [elements] and [reasoning]. The study employed 11 general and specific measure indices for CAF and found that no planning condition significantly enhanced overall accuracy and verb-related specific accuracy or speed and repair fluency regardless of task complexity. Meanwhile, task complexity significantly improved phrasal syntactic complexity regardless of planning. Based on these findings, the study explored two competing theories on L2 speaking.

Natural rhythms of periodic temporal attention

That attention is a fundamentally rhythmic process has recently received abundant empirical evidence. The essence of temporal attention, however, is to flexibly focus in time. Whether this function is constrained by an underlying rhythmic neural mechanism is unknown. In six interrelated experiments, we behaviourally quantify the sampling capacities of periodic temporal attention during auditory or visual perception. We reveal the presence of limited attentional capacities, with an optimal sampling rate of ~1.4 Hz in audition and ~0.7 Hz in vision. Investigating the motor contribution to temporal attention, we show that it scales with motor rhythmic precision, maximal at ~1.7 Hz. Critically, motor modulation is beneficial to auditory but detrimental to visual temporal attention. These results are captured by a computational model of coupled oscillators, that reveals the underlying structural constraints governing the temporal alignment between motor and attention fluctuations.

Effects of task structure on young learners’ writing quality

In the past decade, research has yielded mixed results regarding the relationship between task complexity and writing quality. Some studies have suggested that an increase in task complexity results in the improvement of syntactic complexity, accuracy and fluency. Other studies have demonstrated partial improvement in fluency, accuracy, syntactic complexity, or lexical complexity. This study examines the impact of task structure on writing quality among English-as-a-second-language (ESL) young learners. The analysis is based on 236 ESL fourth-grade pupils’ narrative compositions. Using the Limited Attention Capacity Model and the Cognitive Hypothesis, the analysis revealed that Primary Four pupils wrote significantly longer and syntactically more complex texts in structured tasks, and they scored higher in lexical variety in unstructured tasks. The accuracy of writing did not vary significantly based on task structure. The study provides new empirical evidence for the argument that task structure affects ESL young learners’ writing performance in terms of syntactic complexity, fluency, and lexical variety. The findings contribute new knowledge to the field of second language writing. In particular, how task structures influence writing quality and how such knowledge can inform writing pedagogy and the evaluation of students’ written work.