Attention To Patterns Research Articles

The Selective Social Attention task in children with autism spectrum disorder: Results from the Autism Biomarkers Consortium for Clinical Trials (ABC-CT) feasibility study.

The Selective Social Attention (SSA) task is a brief eye-tracking task involving experimental conditions varying along socio-communicative axes. Traditionally the SSA has been used to probe socially-specific attentional patterns in infants and toddlers who develop autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This current work extends these findings to preschool and school-age children. Children 4- to 12-years-old with ASD (N = 23) and a typically-developing comparison group (TD; N = 25) completed the SSA task as well as standardized clinical assessments. Linear mixed models examined group and condition effects on two outcome variables: percent of time spent looking at the scene relative to scene presentation time (%Valid), and percent of time looking at the face relative to time spent looking at the scene (%Face). Age and IQ were included as covariates. Outcome variables' relationships to clinical data were assessed via correlation analysis. The ASD group, compared to the TD group, looked less at the scene and focused less on the actress' face during the most socially-engaging experimental conditions. Additionally, within the ASD group, %Face negatively correlated with SRS total T-scores with a particularly strong negative correlation with the Autistic Mannerism subscale T-score. These results highlight the extensibility of the SSA to older children with ASD, including replication of between-group differences previously seen in infants and toddlers, as well as its ability to capture meaningful clinical variation within the autism spectrum across a wide developmental span inclusive of preschool and school-aged children. The properties suggest that the SSA may have broad potential as a biomarker for ASD.

Attributional and attentional patterns in the perception of ambiguous harmful encounters involving peer and authority figures.

Self-construal influences the way people ascribe blame to victims, but it is not clear whether the same applies to harm doers, especially those in a position of authority. We examined (N = 122, men n = 60) participants' ascriptions of both blame and intentionality to harm doers (authority figure versus peer) while priming self-construal (relational versus individual self). Using eye-tracking, we explored whether priming relational self, compared to individual self, affects the allocation of attention to faces versus objects. Although no effects of priming were found, the type of harm doer influenced the way people interpreted harmful social encounters. Participants attributed both greater intentionality and blame to peer than authority perpetrators. Also, in the case of peer perpetrators, blame ascription was higher than judgements of intentionality, which was the opposite pattern for authority perpetrators, where judgements of intentionality were greater than ascribed blame. In regard to encoding, participants independently of the type of harm doer looked significantly longer at faces than at objects in violent scenes. Our results suggest the status of perpetrator influences judgements of harm independently of intrapersonal factors, such as primed self-construal. Moreover, people perceived as authority figures are not blamed for the hurtful action, despite attributed intentionality.

Small arrangements with self and others: A visual study of the everyday ordinary on Paris’s A train

It is generally considered that public transport is a more restrictive, less freely chosen form of public space, one that generates less chosen encounters than other public spaces. Daily travel can nonetheless be considered a context of familiar everyday experience, and public transport a place that is likely to reconcile exposure to others with a certain form of privacy. In our research, we used video to observe the ordinary experience of day-to-day mobility in situ on the A train that serves the Paris urban area (France). It reveals a taxonomy of the small arrangements with self and others that travellers display on public transport, by investigating the patterns of attention to others and the methods employed by individuals to cope with the anonymity and ambivalence of everyday experience.

Concept and Evidence of Tourist Risk Gaze

Gaze describes the experiential way that tourists perceive destinations during trips. Destination-related risks are inevitable in tourism; however, little attention has been given to the tourist gaze based on travel risk. Our research addresses this disparity by proposing and exploring the concept of tourist risk gaze. In Study 1, findings suggest that this type of gaze involves three interrelated aspects: risk information gaze, risky attraction gaze, and risky behavior gaze. In Study 2, we invited 50 Chinese university students to participate in an eye-tracking experiment to test tourist risk gaze. Participants displayed distinct visual attention patterns toward these three aspects when tourists encountered them during trips. This research offers a new lens through which to consider the tourist gaze and risk perception. It also introduces a novel eye-tracking method to analyze travel risk and the tourist gaze.

Visual Attention Patterns in Automated and Manual Lane Change Maneuvers

Tesla auto lane change is a feature which automatically steers the vehicle into an adjacent lane when prompted by the driver. 2,473 naturalistic motorway lane changes were annotated to compare driver eye glance behavior before, during, and after maneuvers performed manually and with automation. Change point detection and glance area prevalence revealed distinct patterns in the drivers’ glance behavior. In manual lane changes drivers had more glances to adjacent lanes and over-the-shoulder prior to and during lane crossing compared to automated lane changes which were associated with fewer glances laterally but more glances to the rearview mirror. These differences were more pronounced in lane changes into the leftmost lane. However, in automated exiting maneuvers, drivers had more preparatory glances to adjacent lanes compared to manual. These behaviors could be related to differences in driver visual attention associated with the use of automation.

Effects of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation on Social Attention Patterns and Emotion Recognition Ability in Male Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by impairments in social cognition including emotion recognition (ER) abilities. Common symptoms include unusual patterns of visual social attention, which are investigated as early developmental biomarkers for ASD. Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) has shown promising results in influencing social functioning in individuals with ASD. However, the effects of tDCS on social attention patterns and ER ability in adolescents with ASD remain unclear. This double-blind, sham-controlled, randomized clinical trial examined the effects of repeated sessions of tDCS on gaze behavior and ER ability in 22 male adolescents diagnosed with ASD. Participants received either 20 min of 2 mA active tDCS or sham stimulation for 10 days and an intra-stimulation training. Social allocation patterns were assessed using eye-tracking paradigms, including ER tasks. Our results indicated no tDCS-specific effects. Both groups showed improvements in ER and more frequent, faster, and longer fixations on the eyes than the mouth, and on social than nonsocial areas. In tasks with low social content, fixating the mouth seemed to increase ER accuracy. Understanding the effects of tDCS on social functioning in adolescents with ASD holds promise for the development of targeted interventions to improve their social cognition abilities.

What is the visual behaviour and attentional effort of football players in different positions during a real 11v11 game? A pilot study

Background: Visual perception has been defined as the first step to a football player’s decision-making process and it plays an important role in performance in sport. The skill of focussing to prioritize relevant cues has been also considered crucial in sport. This pilot study aims to explore the visual behaviour and attentional effort of three football players (mean age 19 ± 0 years old) in specific-role positions; Right-winger (RW), Centre-Midfielder (CM) and Left-Back (LB), in the five seconds before receiving the ball from their teammate. Methods: Twenty-two male football players performed an 11v11 game, where 24 game sequences (trials) from which 166 fixations were recorded and analysed via the Tobii Pro eye-movement registration glasses and software. The gaze behaviour dependent variables were the mean of fixation duration (FD), time to first fixation (TTF), both measured in milliseconds (ms), and the number of fixations (NF) on eight areas of interest (AOIs). AOIs include teammate with and without the ball, opponent without the ball, space around teammate with and without the ball, space around opponent without the ball, ball and undefined. The mean pupil diameter (PD) correlates to the attentional effort and was measured in millimetres (mm). Results: Descriptive statistics showed nonregular search rate data between the participants in FD, TTF, NF on the AOIs. Mean FD on the ball: (CM, 270 ms), (RW, 570 ms), (CM, 380 ms). They also presented differences in the mean PD during play; (CM: 2.90 mm ± 0.26), (RW: 2.74 mm ± 0.30), (LB 2.77mm ± 0.27). Conclusions: Albeit the sample size was small, the findings demonstrated a promising way to measure the on-field perceptual-cognitive abilities of football players according to their specific positions, since different playing roles revealed to present distinctive visual and attentional patterns.

Differential and Overlapping Effects between Exogenous and Endogenous Attention Shape Perceptual Facilitation during Visual Processing.

Visuospatial attention is not a monolithic process and can be divided into different functional systems. In this framework, exogenous attention reflects the involuntary orienting of attention resources following a salient event, whereas endogenous attention corresponds to voluntary orienting based on the goals and intentions of individuals. Previous work shows that these attention processes map onto distinct functional systems, yet evidence suggests that they are not fully independent. In the current work, we investigated the differential and overlapping effects of exogenous and endogenous attention on visual processing. We combined spatial cueing of visuospatial attention, EEG, and multivariate pattern analysis to examine where and when the effects of exogenous and endogenous attention were maximally different and maximally similar. Critically, multivariate pattern analysis provided new insights by examining whether classifiers trained to decode the cueing effect for one attention process (e.g., exogenous attention) can successfully decode the cueing effect for the other attention process (e.g., endogenous attention). These analyses uncovered differential and overlapping effects between exogenous and endogenous attention. Next, we combined principal component analyses, single-trial ERPs, and mediation analysis to determine whether these effects facilitate perception, as indexed by the behavioral spatial cueing effects of exogenous and endogenous attention. This approach revealed that three EEG components shape the cueing effects of exogenous and endogenous attention at various times after target onset. Altogether, our study provides a comprehensive account about how overlapping and differential processes of endogenous and exogenous relate to perceptual facilitation in the context of visuospatial attention.

Effects of English versus Spanish language exposure on basic multisensory attention skills across 3 to 36 months of age.

Recent research has demonstrated that individual differences in infant attention to faces and voices of women speaking predict language outcomes in childhood. These findings have been generated using two new audiovisual attention assessments appropriate for infants and young children, the Multisensory Attention Assessment Protocol (MAAP) and the Intersensory Processing Efficiency Protocol (IPEP). The MAAP and IPEP assess three basic attention skills (sustaining attention, shifting/disengaging, intersensory matching), as well as distractibility, deployed in the context of naturalistic audiovisual social (women speaking English) and nonsocial events (objects impacting a surface). Might children with differential exposure to Spanish versus English show different patterns of attention to social events on these protocols as a function of language familiarity? We addressed this question in several ways using children (n = 81 dual-language learners; n = 23 monolingual-language learners) from South Florida, tested longitudinally across 3-36 months. Surprisingly, results indicated no significant English language advantage on any attention measure for children from monolingual English versus dual English-Spanish language environments. Second, for dual-language learners, exposure to English changed across age, decreasing slightly from 3-12 months and then increasing considerably by 36 months. Furthermore, for dual-language learners, structural equation modeling analyses revealed no English language advantage on the MAAP or IPEP as a function of degree of English language exposure. The few relations found were in the direction of greater performance for children with greater Spanish exposure. Together, findings indicate no English language advantage for basic multisensory attention skills assessed by the MAAP or IPEP between the ages of 3 to 36 months. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Temporal course of attention bias toward emotional faces in individuals with autistic traits: an eye-movement study.

Similar attention patterns have been found in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and autistic traits (ATs). The Intense World Theory and previous studies suggest that individuals with ASD may demonstrate a vigilance-avoidance attention pattern toward emotional faces. However, the attention patterns in individuals with ATs remain unclear. Therefore, this study employs eye-tracking technology to examine the characteristics and temporal course of attention bias toward emotional faces in individuals with ATs. The Autism-spectrum Quotient (AQ) was used to evaluate the level of ATs among 2,502 college students. A total of 50 participants were selected from the 2,502 college students: 25 high-AQ group participants were randomly selected from the 10% of individuals with the highest AQ scores. Similarly, 25 low-AQ group participants were randomly selected from the 10% of participants with the lowest AQ scores. All selected participants completed an eye-tracking study while performing a dot-probe task with emotional faces (positive-neutral, negative-neutral, and negative-positive). By analyzing data from different time periods, the attention bias and time course of individuals with ATs toward emotional faces were investigated. The results show that compared to the low-AQ group, the high-AQ group detected negative faces faster in the early stages of emotional face processing. As the presentation time of emotional faces increased (at the 2-3 s mark), the fixation scores for negative-neutral faces of the high-AQ group were less than 0.5, which was significantly lower than those of the low-AQ group. Meanwhile, the high-AQ group showed brief attentional avoidance toward positive emotion at 3-4 s in the positive-neutral trials, indicating that the high-AQ group exhibited attention avoidance to both negative and positive faces during the middle and later stages of emotional processing. This study suggests that individuals with ATs display a vigilance-avoidance pattern toward emotional faces. It contributes to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of attention in persons with ATs and further supports the Intense World Theory.

Ecological anxiety and pro-environmental behaviour: The role of attention

Climate change is a serious threat to human health and the awareness of this threat can elicit ecological anxiety (eco-anxiety), which could be considered a rational and potentially adaptive response. However, the experience of eco-anxiety does not always lead to adaptive behaviour. The present study investigated whether differential patterns of selective attention towards climate-related information, and variability in this attention, might explain this inconsistent relationship. Participants completed a dot-probe assessment of attentional bias to images of both climate change mitigation strategies and of climate change causes and consequences, and measures of eco-anxiety, climate change belief, environmental self-efficacy, and general psychological symptoms. Engagement in pro-environmental behaviours was measured using a daily behavioural diary. Eco-anxiety and attentional bias independently predicted behaviour, but did not interact. However, attentional bias variability moderated the relationship between eco-anxiety and behaviour, such that higher eco-anxiety predicted greater behavioural engagement, but only when attentional bias variability was low. This was the first known study to examine the potential moderating effect of attentional bias on the relationship between eco-anxiety and pro-environmental behaviours. This growing field of research can help in identifying how the rational response of eco-anxiety can be better harnessed to motivate an adaptive response to the climate crisis.

Comparative strengths and challenges on face-to-face and computer-based attention tasks in autistic and neurotypical toddlers.

The objectives were to compare patterns of visual attention in toddlers diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) as compared to their sex- and age-matched neurotypical (NT) peers. Participants included 23 toddlers with ASD and 19 NT toddlers (mean age: 25.52 versus 25.21 months, respectively) assessed using computerized tasks to measure sustained attention, disengaging attention, and cognitive control, as well as an in-person task to assess joint attention. Toddlers in the ASD group showed increased looking durations on the sustained attention task, as well as reduced frequencies of responding to and initiating joint attention compared to NT peers, but showed no differences on tasks of disengaging attention and cognitive control. The results suggest that toddlers with ASD have attentional strengths that may provide a foundation for building attention, communicative, and ultimately, academic skills.

The effects of left prefrontal stimulation on selective attention and emotional reactivity for positive and negative information

Transcranial direct current stimulation targeting lateral prefrontal areas may attenuate attentional vigilance for negative content and reduce emotional reactivity. However, little research to date has examined how such stimulation may affect attention towards and emotional reactivity to positive emotional content. The aim of this study was to examine whether anodal tDCS targeting the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex would affect attentional bias towards either or both negative and positive content, and similarly, how it would impact emotional reactivity to negative and positive emotional content among healthy individuals. Unselected participants (N = 101) were recruited (Mage = 22.57, SD = 5.60; 66.33% female) and allocated to either an active or sham tDCS condition. Attentional bias was measured using an eye-tracking task involving negative-neutral and positive-neutral image pairs, followed by an emotional reactivity assessment task involving negative and positive video content (self-report and heart rate variability). Results showed no evidence that tDCS influenced attentional patterns towards either positive or negative information, nor was there evidence that tDCS influenced self-reported anxious mood or physiological arousal. However, participants in the active tDCS condition reported higher positive mood in response to both the positive and negative videos compared to those in the sham condition and also higher arousal in response to positive content and lower arousal in response to negative content, with those in the sham tDCS condition showing the reverse pattern of effects. As such, tDCS effects on emotional reactivity to positive and negative content were restricted to self-report measures.

Umami-BERT: An interpretable BERT-based model for umami peptides prediction

Umami peptides have received extensive attention due to their ability to enhance flavors and provide nutritional benefits. The increasing demand for novel umami peptides and the vast number of peptides present in food call for more efficient methods to screen umami peptides, and further exploration is necessary. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to develop deep learning (DL) model to realize rapid screening of umami peptides. The Umami-BERT model was devised utilizing a novel two-stage training strategy with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and the inception network. In the pre-training stage, attention mechanisms were implemented on a large amount of bioactive peptides sequences to acquire high-dimensional generalized features. In the re-training stage, umami peptide prediction was carried out on UMP789 dataset, which is developed through the latest research. The model achieved the performance with an accuracy (ACC) of 93.23% and MCC of 0.78 on the balanced dataset, as well as an ACC of 95.00% and MCC of 0.85 on the unbalanced dataset. The results demonstrated that Umami-BERT could predict umami peptides directly from their amino acid sequences and exceeded the performance of other models. Furthermore, Umami-BERT enabled the analysis of attention pattern learned by Umami-BERT model. The amino acids Alanine (A), Cysteine (C), Aspartate (D), and Glutamicacid (E) were found to be the most significant contributors to umami peptides. Additionally, the patterns of summarized umami peptides involving A, C, D, and E were analyzed based on the learned attention weights. Consequently, Umami-BERT exhibited great potential in the large-scale screening of candidate peptides and offers novel insight for the further exploration of umami peptides.

What is the visual behaviour and attentional effort of football players in different positions during a real 11v11 game? A pilot study

Background: Visual perception has been defined as the first step to a football player’s decision-making process and it plays an important role in performance in sport. The skill of focussing to prioritize relevant cues has been also considered crucial in sport. This pilot study aims to explore the visual behaviour and attentional effort of three football players (mean age 19 ± 0 years old) in specific-role positions; Right-winger (RW), Centre-Midfielder (CM) and Left-Back (LB), in the five seconds before receiving the ball from their teammate. Methods: Twenty-two male football players performed an 11v11 game, where 24 game sequences (trials) from which 166 fixations were recorded and analysed via the Tobii Pro eye-movement registration glasses and software. The gaze behaviour dependent variables were the mean of fixation duration (FD), time to first fixation (TTF), both measured in milliseconds (ms), and the number of fixations (NF) on eight areas of interest (AOIs). AOIs include teammate with and without the ball, opponent without the ball, space around teammate with and without the ball, space around opponent without the ball, ball and undefined. The mean pupil diameter (PD) correlates to the attentional effort and was measured in millimetres (mm). Results: Descriptive statistics showed nonregular search rate data between the participants in FD, TTF, NF on the AOIs. Mean FD on the ball: (CM, 270 ms), (RW, 570 ms), (CM, 380 ms). They also presented differences in the mean PD during play; (CM: 2.90 mm ± 0.26), (RW: 2.74 mm ± 0.30), (LB 2.77mm ± 0.27). Conclusions: Albeit the sample size was small, the findings demonstrated a promising way to measure the on-field perceptual-cognitive abilities of football players according to their specific positions, since different playing roles revealed to present distinctive visual and attentional patterns.

Predicting Decision-Making in Virtual Environments: An Eye Movement Analysis with Household Products

Understanding consumer behavior is crucial for increasing the likelihood of product success. Virtual Reality head-mounted displays incorporating physiological techniques such as eye-tracking offer novel opportunities to study user behavior in decision-making tasks. These methods reveal unconscious or undisclosed consumer responses. Yet, research into gaze patterns during virtual product evaluations remains scarce. In this context, an experiment was conducted to investigate users’ gaze behavior when evaluating their preferences for 64 virtual prototypes of a bedside table. Here, 24 participants evaluated and selected their preferred design through eight repeated tasks of an 8-AFC, with individual evaluations conducted for each design to ensure the reliability of the findings. Several eye-tracking metrics were computed (i.e., gaze time, visits, and time to first gaze), statistical tests were applied, and a Long Short-Term Memory model was created to recognize decisions based on attentional patterns. Our results revealed that the Gaze Cascade Model was replicated in virtual environments and that a correlation between product liking and eye-tracking metrics exists. We recognize subjects’ decisions with a 90% accuracy, based on their eye patterns during the three seconds before their decision. The results suggest that eye-tracking can be an effective tool for decision-making prediction during product assessment in virtual environments.

Watch out! A path from anxiety to anorexia nervosa through biased attention?

Evidence points towards heightened anxiety and attention biases (AB) towards disorder-specific (threatening) stimuli in patients with anorexia nervosa (AN). To date, it is unclear how anxiety and AB interact in eating disorders (ED). The present study tests the causal role of anxiety by inducing anxiety before a dot-probe task with either ED-specific stimuli or unspecific negative (threat-related) information. We expected that anxiety would elicit AB for ED-specific, but not for unspecific threat-related stimuli. Adolescents with AN (AN, n=32) or depression (DEP, n=27) and healthy controls (HC, n=29) underwent an anxiety induction or a low anxiety control task before a pictorial dot-probe task with either under-/overweight body-related pictures or non-disorder-related threatening pictures (angry faces). BMI, level of ED symptoms, anxiety, stress, and depression were assessed at baseline. The anxiety induction did not affect the observed attention pattern. AN showed an AB towards underweight body pictures compared to HC, whereas no disorder-unspecific threat-related AB emerged. Regression analyses revealed that only anxiety predicted the AB towards underweight body pictures. Further experimental research may integrate eye tracking as an additional tool, or collect information on body dissatisfaction to obtain a better understanding of how anxiety biases attention.

The contextual goal dependent attentional flexibility (CoGoDAF) framework: A new approach to attention bias in depression

Successful adaptation to the environment requires attentional prioritization of emotional information relevant to the current situational demands. Accordingly, the presence of an attention bias (AB) for both positive and negative information may allow preferential processing of stimuli in line with the current situational goals. However, AB for negative information sometimes becomes maladaptive, being antithetical to the current adaptive needs and goals of an individual, such as in the case of affective disorders such as depression. Although difficulties in flexible shifting between emotional stimuli in depression have increasingly become a topic of discussion in the field, an integrative approach towards biased versus flexible emotional attentional processes remains absent. In the present paper, we advance a novel and integrative view of conceptualizing potentially aberrant affective attention patterns in depression as a function of the current contextual features. We propose that flexible emotional attention takes place as a result of attention prioritization towards goal-relevant emotional stimuli depending upon the current context of the individual. Specifically, the roles of context, distal and proximal goals, and approach and avoidance motivation processes are considered in a unified manner. The empirical, clinical, and interventional implications of this integrative framework provide a roadmap for future psychological and neurobiological experimental and translational research.

Developing SAMM: A Model for Measuring Sustained Attention in Asynchronous Online Learning

There is a strong relationship between sustainability and equality education, as it is emphasized in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To maintain learning effectiveness, learning attention is a valuable consideration. By continuously monitoring learners’ attention, the teaching and learning process can be measured and adjusted as needed. However, it poses a challenge for measuring attention in online learning environments where all participants do not interact face-to-face. To address this concern, this paper proposes a sustained attention measurement model (SAMM) that establishes attention tests to gauge learners’ sustained attention levels during asynchronous online learning. SAMM presents learners with real-time questions based on course content, collecting both their response time and accuracy. In an experiment conducted over an academic semester, we recruited 213 students from a private Taiwanese university of technology and analyzed their response time and accuracy rate to identify attention patterns in the online learning system. This analysis can provide valuable feedback for instructors to adjust their teaching methods.

How Does Attention Work in Vision Transformers? A Visual Analytics Attempt.

Vision transformer (ViT) expands the success of transformer models from sequential data to images. The model decomposes an image into many smaller patches and arranges them into a sequence. Multi-head self-attentions are then applied to the sequence to learn the attention between patches. Despite many successful interpretations of transformers on sequential data, little effort has been devoted to the interpretation of ViTs, and many questions remain unanswered. For example, among the numerous attention heads, which one is more important? How strong are individual patches attending to their spatial neighbors in different heads? What attention patterns have individual heads learned? In this work, we answer these questions through a visual analytics approach. Specifically, we first identify what heads are more important in ViTs by introducing multiple pruning-based metrics. Then, we profile the spatial distribution of attention strengths between patches inside individual heads, as well as the trend of attention strengths across attention layers. Third, using an autoencoder-based learning solution, we summarize all possible attention patterns that individual heads could learn. Examining the attention strengths and patterns of the important heads, we answer why they are important. Through concrete case studies with experienced deep learning experts on multiple ViTs, we validate the effectiveness of our solution that deepens the understanding of ViTs from head importance, head attention strength, and head attention pattern.