Periods Of Sustained Attention Research Articles

Signal in the noise: Dimensions of predictability in the home auditory environment are associated with neurobehavioral measures of early infant sustained attention.

The home auditory environment influences the development of early language abilities, and excessive noise exposure is increasingly linked with deficits in language and reading scores in children. However, fewer studies have considered the role of noise exposure in shaping the development of attentional processing in early infancy, a foundational neurocognitive skill relevant for learning. Here, we used passive at-home auditory recording to investigate how multiple dimensions of infants' home auditory environments, including both the quantity and the predictability of auditory input, impacts neural and behavioral measures of sustained attention in a sociodemographically diverse sample of 3-month-old infants (N= 98 infants, 62 males; age M=3.48 months, SD=0.39; 52% Hispanic/Latino). Results indicated that infants who were exposed to more predictable patterns of auditory input in the home demonstrated longer overall time in sustained attention during laboratory assessments. In addition, infants' who experienced more predictable auditory input also demonstrated greater relative increases in electroencephalography frontal theta power during periods of sustained attention, a neural marker relevant to information processing and attentional control. These findings provide novel evidence into the importance of the predictability of early environmental inputs in shaping developing cortical circuitry and attentional systems from the first months of postnatal life.

Meta-analysis of effectiveness of electroencephalogram monitoring of sustained attention for improving online learning achievement

The conclusions of previous studies have not been consistent regarding the effects of the use of electroencephalogram (EEG) monitoring technology to improve the sustained attention and online learning achievement of students. Therefore, we performed a meta-analysis of the results of nine experimental studies. Results indicate that the combined effect of EEG monitoring during periods of sustained attention was moderately positive in improving students' online learning achievement (value of combined effect in the studies = .52). The greatest impact of EEG monitoring of sustained attention regarding students' online learning achievement was found for an openended design challenge of immersive virtual reality (reminder feedback). No significant difference was found according to education level.

Fascinatin’ Rhythm – and Pauses in Translators’ Cognitive Processes

The Monitor Model fosters a view of translating where two mind modes stand out and alternate when trying to render originals word-by-word by default: shallow, uneventful processing vs problem solving. Research may have been biased towards problem solving, often operationalized with a pause of, or above, 3 seconds. This project analyzed 16 translation log files by four informants from four originals. A baseline minimal pause of 200 ms was instrumental to calculate two individual thresholds for each log file: (a) A low one – 1.5 times the median pause within words – and (b) a high one – 3 times the median pause between words. Pauses were then characterized as short (between 200 ms and the lower threshold), mid, and long (above the higher threshold, chunking the recorded activities in the translation task into task segments), and assumed to respond to different causes. Weak correlations between short, mid and long pauses were found, hinting at possible different cognitive processes. Inferred processes did not fall neatly into categories depending on the length of possibly associated pauses. Mid pauses occurred more often than long pauses between sentences and paragraphs, and they also more often flanked information searches and even problem-solving instances. Chains of proximal mid pauses marked cases of potential hesitations. Task segments tended to happen within 4–8 minute cycles, nested in a possible initial phase for contextualization, followed by long periods of sustained attention. We found no evidence for problem-solving thresholds, and no trace of behavior supporting the Monitor Model.

Visual Short-Term Memory Activity in Parietal Lobe Reflects Cognitive Processes beyond Attentional Selection.

Visual short-term memory (VSTM) and attention are distinct yet interrelated processes. While both require selection of information across the visual field, memory additionally requires the maintenance of information across time and distraction. VSTM recruits areas within human (male and female) dorsal and ventral parietal cortex that are also implicated in spatial selection; therefore, it is important to determine whether overlapping activation might reflect shared attentional demands. Here, identical stimuli and controlled sustained attention across both tasks were used to ask whether fMRI signal amplitude, functional connectivity, and contralateral visual field bias reflect memory-specific task demands. While attention and VSTM activated similar cortical areas, BOLD amplitude and functional connectivity in parietal cortex differentiated the two tasks. Relative to attention, VSTM increased BOLD amplitude in dorsal parietal cortex and decreased BOLD amplitude in the angular gyrus. Additionally, the tasks differentially modulated parietal functional connectivity. Contrasting VSTM and attention, intraparietal sulcus (IPS) 1-2 were more strongly connected with anterior frontoparietal areas and more weakly connected with posterior regions. This divergence between tasks demonstrates that parietal activation reflects memory-specific functions and consequently modulates functional connectivity across the cortex. In contrast, both tasks demonstrated hemispheric asymmetries for spatial processing, exhibiting a stronger contralateral visual field bias in the left versus the right hemisphere across tasks, suggesting that asymmetries are characteristic of a shared selection process in IPS. These results demonstrate that parietal activity and patterns of functional connectivity distinguish VSTM from more general attention processes, establishing a central role of the parietal cortex in maintaining visual information.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Visual short-term memory (VSTM) and attention are distinct yet interrelated processes. Cognitive mechanisms and neural activity underlying these tasks show a large degree of overlap. To examine whether activity within the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) reflects object maintenance across distraction or sustained attention per se, it is necessary to control for attentional demands inherent in VSTM tasks. We demonstrate that activity in PPC reflects VSTM demands even after controlling for attention; remembering items across distraction modulates relationships between parietal and other areas differently than during periods of sustained attention. Our study fills a gap in the literature by directly comparing and controlling for overlap between visual attention and VSTM tasks.

Covert Shifts of Spatial Attention in the Macaque Monkey

In the awake state, shifts of spatial attention alternate with periods of sustained attention at a fixed location or object. Human fMRI experiments revealed the critical role of the superior parietal lobule (SPL) in shifting spatial attention, a finding not predicted by human lesion studies and monkey electrophysiology. To investigate whether a potential homolog of the human SPL shifting region exists in monkeys (Macaca mulatta), we adopted an event-related fMRI paradigm that closely resembled a human experiment (Molenberghs et al., 2007). In this paradigm, a pair of relevant and irrelevant shapes was continuously present on the horizontal meridian. Subjects had to covertly detect a dimming of the relevant shape while ignoring the irrelevant dimmings. The events of interest consisted of the replacement of one stimulus pair by the next. During shift but not stay events, the relevant shape of the new pair appeared at the contralateral position relative to the previous one. Spatial shifting events activated parietal areas V6/V6A and medial intraparietal area, caudo-dorsal visual areas, the most posterior portion of the superior temporal sulcus, and several smaller frontal areas. These areas were not activated during passive stimulation with the same sensory stimuli. During stay events, strong direction-sensitive attention signals were observed in a distributed set of contralateral visual, temporal, parietal, and lateral prefrontal areas, the vast majority overlapping with the sensory stimulus representation. We suggest medial intraparietal area and V6/V6A as functional counterparts of human SPL because they contained the most widespread shift signals in the absence of contralateral stay activity, resembling the functional characteristics of the human SPL shifting area.

Poorer sustained attention in bipolar I than bipolar II disorder

BackgroundNearly all information processing during cognitive processing takes place during periods of sustained attention. Sustained attention deficit is among the most commonly reported impairments in bipolar disorder (BP). The majority of previous studies have only focused on bipolar I disorder (BP I), owing to underdiagnosis or misdiagnosis of bipolar II disorder (BP II). With the refinement of the bipolar spectrum paradigm, the goal of this study was to compare the sustained attention of interepisode patients with BP I to those with BP II.MethodsIn all, 51 interepisode BP patients (22 with BP I and 29 with BP II) and 20 healthy controls participated in this study. The severity of psychiatric symptoms was assessed by the 17-item Hamilton Depression Rating Scale and the Young Mania Rating Scale. All participants undertook Conners' Continuous Performance Test II (CPT-II) to evaluate sustained attention.ResultsAfter controlling for the severity of symptoms, age and years of education, BP I patients had a significantly longer reaction times (F(2,68) = 7.648, P = 0.001), worse detectability (d') values (F(2,68) = 6.313, P = 0.003) and more commission errors (F(2,68) = 6.182, P = 0.004) than BP II patients and healthy controls. BP II patients and controls scored significantly higher than BP I patients for d' (F = 6.313, P = 0.003). No significant difference was found among the three groups in omission errors and no significant correlations were observed between CPT-II performance and clinical characteristics in the three groups.ConclusionsThese findings suggested that impairments in sustained attention might be more representative of BP I than BP II after controlling for the severity of symptoms, age, years of education and reaction time on the attentional test. A longitudinal follow-up study design with a larger sample size might be needed to provide more information on chronological sustained attention deficit in BP patients, and to illustrate clearer differentiations between the three groups.

On audiovisual spatial synergy: The fragility of the phenomenon

Recent literature has highlighted the importance and ubiquity of cross-modal links in spatial attention, whereby shifts in attention in one modality often induce corresponding shifts in other modalities. We attempted to provide further evidence for the case of audiovisual links during sustained endogenous attention by addressing several potential methodological confounds in previous demonstrations. However, we failed repeatedly to reproduce the phenomenon of spatial synergies between auditory and visual attention, found by Driver and Spence (1994) and frequently cited to support the automatic nature of cross-modal attention links. We discuss the results in light of recent evidence about cross-modal spatial links during sustained attention and support the idea that such links can weaken or even disappear under certain circumstances, such as during periods of sustained attention. The implication is that individuals can select inputs from different modalities from different locations more easily than previously had been thought.

Subjective experience and the attentional lapse: Task engagement and disengagement during sustained attention

Three experiments investigated the relationship between subjective experience and attentional lapses during sustained attention. These experiments employed two measures of subjective experience (thought probes and questionnaires) to examine how differences in awareness correspond to variations in both task performance (reaction time and errors) and psycho-physiological measures (heart rate and galvanic skin response). This series of experiments examine these phenomena during the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART, Robertson, Manly, Andrade, Baddeley, & Yiend, 1997). The results suggest we can dissociate between two components of subjective experience during sustained attention: (A) task unrelated thought which corresponds to an absent minded disengagement from the task and (B) a pre-occupation with one's task performance that seems to be best conceptualised as a strategic attempt to deploy attentional resources in response to a perception of environmental demands which exceed ones ability to perform the task. The implications of these findings for our understanding of how awareness is maintained on task relevant material during periods of sustained attention are discussed.