Redistribution Of Attention Research Articles

Social Intervention Impacts Action Anticipation, Goal Extraction, and Social Interest in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Anticipatory looking in the context of goal-directed actions emerges during the first year of life. However, children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often show diminished social gaze and anticipation while observing goal-directed actions. The current study examined a therapist-mediated social intervention targeting action-anticipation, goal-extraction, and social gaze in 18 children with ASD diagnosis. Before and after the intervention period, children viewed a video displaying a toddler repeatedly placing blocks into a bowl using a cross-body motion. Gaze to the actor’s face and anticipatory gaze to the goal location were analyzed. Results revealed that young children with ASD understand repeated actions and demonstrate goal-extraction even before exposure to the intervention. Further, targeted social intervention experience led to a redistribution of attention in favor of the actor’s face, while retaining action intention comprehension of the block transfer activity. Attention to social aspects during action observation by children with ASD could have favorable cascading effects on social reciprocity, social contingency, and theory of mind development.

Attentive tracking involves a demand-based dynamic redistribution of attention

Attentive tracking involves a demand-based dynamic redistribution of attention

Distributing attention across multiple social worlds

Being a member of both local and global teams requires constant distribution and re-distribution of attention, engagement, and intensive communication over synchronous and asynchronous channels with remote and local partners. We explore in this paper the increasing number of social worlds such participants distribute their attention to, how this affects their level of engagement and attention, and how the workspace, collaboration technologies, and interaction modes afford and constrain the communicative events. The use of information and collaboration technologies (ICT) shapes and reshapes work spaces, processes, and social interactions among team members, and team members reshape ICT and the way it is used. We use as a testbed the AEC Global Teamwork course established at Stanford in 1993 in collaboration with universities worldwide and provide examples from two sites—Stanford PBL Lab, California USA and Chalmers University, Goteborg Sweden. We used temporal analysis and qualitative methods of inquiry in order to study participants’ attention, how they used the site and the means, i.e., their social and material resources, to accomplish their interaction needs, and how they engaged throughout project reviews.

Event-related brain potentials and attention during simultaneous performance of two tasks.

Subjects were required to perform simultaneously a compensatory manual tracking task and an auditory discrimination task. Four behavioral measures, root-mean-square-tracking error, reaction-time, Sensitivity and Response Bias, and two physiological measures, peak amplitudes and peak latencies of the "negative difference" even-related brain potential, were used to assess the distribution of attention during task performance. Approximately 200 msec. after stimulus onset (peak latency M = 206.6 msec.), the negative difference potential's peak amplitude was more positive for tones irrelevant to the discrimination task and less positive for tones relevant to the discrimination task. This pattern of change suggests that irrelevant tones receive less attention during simultaneous performance of the tasks than during performance of the discrimination task alone. Moreover, the data suggest that the redistribution of attention while simultaneously performing the tasks directly affects processing in the sensory areas of the auditory cortex.

Visual attentional span as a function of a small dose of alcohol.

An experimental study was performed testing whether a small dose of alcohol would lead to larger decrements in simple visual reaction time for peripheral signals compared to central ones. Analysis indicated such an effect of alcohol, which was discussed as supportive of an interpretation in terms of impaired peripheral sensory sensitivity rather than a redistribution of attention within the visual field.