Spotlight Of Attention Research Articles

Depression, Ketamine Treatment, and the Theater of Consciousness

In severe depression thoughts of suicide can develop over weeks or months. Traditional pharmacologic or psychotherapeutic treatments take several weeks before they begin to improve symptoms. This gradual improvement is consistent with our everyday experience of the self. However, a new treatment, ketamine, can alter depressive symptoms within hours or even minutes. Ketamine can stop suicidal thoughts in as little as 20 minutes and is being developed to treat suicidal patients in the emergency room. Rapid changes in a belief as complex as suicide raise new questions about the self and identity. More complicated models of the self are required to understand how rapid changes in complex beliefs are possible without invoking unrealistic specificity in the brain (i.e. grandmother cells for belief). If the brain has multiple competing selves within modules then ketamine could work by either turning a self module on or off. This is consistent with a modified version of the global workspace theory of consciousness where a self module provides the context for the spotlight of attention.

Bereaved Siblings' Advice to Health Care Professionals Working With Children With Cancer and Their Families.

Siblings of children with cancer experience psychosocial distress during the illness and after bereavement, but often stand outside the spotlight of attention and care. This study explored bereaved siblings' advice to health care professionals (HCPs) working with children with cancer and their families. In a nationwide Swedish survey of bereaved siblings, 174/240 (73%) participated. Of these, 108 answered an open-ended question about what advice they would give to HCPs working with children with cancer and their families. In this study, responses to this single question were analyzed using content analysis. The most common advice, suggested by 56% of siblings, related to their own support. One third suggested giving better medical information to siblings. Some siblings wanted to be more practically involved in their brother's/sister's care and suggested that HCPs should give parents guidance on how to involve siblings. Other common advice related to psychosocial aspects, such as the siblings' wish for HCPs to mediate hope, yet also realism, and the importance of asking the ill child about what care they wanted. Information, communication, and involvement should be emphasized by HCPs to support siblings' psychosocial needs in both the health care setting and within the family.

More attentional focusing through binaural beats: evidence from the global\u2013local task

A recent study showed that binaural beats have an impact on the efficiency of allocating attention over time. We were interested to see whether this impact affects attentional focusing or, even further, the top-down control over irrelevant information. Healthy adults listened to gamma-frequency (40 Hz) binaural beats, which are assumed to increase attentional concentration, or a constant tone of 340 Hz (control condition) for 3 min before and during a global–local task. While the size of the congruency effect (indicating the failure to suppress task-irrelevant information) was unaffected by the binaural beats, the global-precedence effect (reflecting attentional focusing) was considerably smaller after gamma-frequency binaural beats than after the control condition. Our findings suggest that high-frequency binaural beats bias the individual attentional processing style towards a reduced spotlight of attention.

Theta oscillations modulate attentional search performance periodically.

Visual search--finding a target element among similar-looking distractors--is one of the prevailing experimental methods to study attention. Current theories of visual search postulate an early stage of feature extraction interacting with an attentional process that selects candidate targets for further analysis; in difficult search situations, this selection is iterated until the target is found. Although such theories predict an intrinsic periodicity in the neuronal substrates of attentional search, this prediction has not been extensively tested in human electrophysiology. Here, using EEG and TMS, we study attentional periodicities in visual search. EEG measurements indicated that successful and unsuccessful search trials were associated with different amounts of poststimulus oscillatory amplitude and phase-locking at ∼6 Hz and opposite prestimulus oscillatory phase at ∼6 Hz. A trial-by-trial comparison of pre- and poststimulus ∼6 Hz EEG phases revealed that the functional interplay between prestimulus brain states, poststimulus oscillations, and successful search performance was mediated by a partial phase reset of ongoing oscillations. Independently, TMS applied over occipital cortex at various intervals after search onset demonstrated a periodic pattern of interference at ∼6 Hz. The converging evidence from independent TMS and EEG measurements demonstrates that attentional search is modulated periodically by brain oscillations. This periodicity is naturally compatible with a sequential exploration by attention, although a parallel but rhythmically modulated attention spotlight cannot be entirely ruled out.

Adults with dyslexia can use cues to orient and constrain attention but have a smaller and weaker attention spotlight

We report results from two experiments assessing distribution of attention and cue use in adults with dyslexia (AwD) and in a group of typically reading controls. Experiment 1 showed normal effects of cueing in AwD, with faster responses when probes were presented within a cued area and normal effects of eccentricity and stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA). In addition, AwD showed stronger benefits of a longer SOA when they had to move attention farther, and stronger effects of inclusion on the left, suggesting that cueing is particularly important in more difficult conditions. Experiment 2 tested the use of cues in a texture detection task involving a wider range of eccentricities and a shorter SOA. In this paradigm, focused attention at the central location is actually detrimental and cueing further reduces performance. Thus, if AwD have a more distributed attention, they should show a reduced performance drop at central locations and, if they do not use cues, they should show less negative effects of cueing. In contrast, AwD showed a larger drop and a positive effect of cueing. These results are better accounted for by a smaller and weaker spotlight of attention. Performance does not decrease at central locations because the attentional spotlight is already deployed with maximum intensity, which cannot be further enhanced at central locations. Instead, use of cueing helps to focus limited resources. Cues orient attention to the right area without enhancing it to the point where this is detrimental for texture detection. Implications for reading are discussed.

Molecular ecological tools to decipher the role of our microbial mass in obesity.

After birth, our gastrointestinal (GI) tract is colonised by a highly complex assemblage of microbes, collectively termed the GI microbiota, that develops intimate interactions with our body. Recent evidence indicates that the GI microbiota and its products may contribute to the development of obesity and related diseases. This, coupled with the current worldwide epidemic of obesity, has moved microbiome research into the spotlight of attention. Although the main cause of obesity and its associated metabolic complications is excess caloric intake compared with expenditure, differences in GI tract microbial ecology between individuals might be an important biomarker, mediator or new therapeutic target. This can be investigated using a diverse set of complementary so called -omics technologies, such as 16S ribosomal RNA gene-targeted composition profiling, metabolomics, metagenomics, metatranscriptomics and metaproteomics. This review aims to describe the different molecular approaches and their contributions to our understanding of the role of the GI microbiota in host energy homeostasis. Correspondingly, we highlight their respective strengths, but also try to create awareness for their specific limitations. However, it is currently still unclear which bacterial groups play a role in the development of obesity in humans. This might partly be explained by the heterogeneity in genotype, lifestyle, diet and the complex ethology of obesity and its associated metabolic disorders (OAMD). Nevertheless, recent research on this matter has shown a conceptual shift by focusing on more homogenous subpopulations, through the use of both anthropometric (weight, total body fat) as well as biochemical variables (insulin resistance, hyperlipidaemia) to define categories. Combined with technological advances, recent data suggests that an OAMD associated microbiota can be characterised by a potential pro-inflammatory composition, with less potential for the production of short chain fatty acids and butyrate in particular.

Media Makes Momentum

Relying on 2.2 million articles from forty-five national and local U.S. newspapers between 1989 and 2010, we find that firms particularly covered by the media exhibit, ceteris paribus, significantly stronger momentum. The effect depends on article tone, reverses in the long run, is more pronounced for stocks with high uncertainty, and is stronger in states with high investor individualism. Our findings suggest that media coverage can exacerbate investor biases, leading return predictability to be strongest for firms in the spotlight of public attention. These results collectively lend credibility to an overreaction-based explanation for the momentum effect.

Big Data Based Design of Food Safety Cloud Platform

Food safety has been in the spotlight of the global attention. In 2013, Chinas food safety supervision policy was undertaken a major reform. China Food and Drug Administration (CFDA) takes over the responsibility of food safety management, which in the past was conducted by different government sectors. Under this new management system, how to carry out the practical work has become a new issue. This paper introduces an innovative food safety management mode adopted by Guizhou province. On the basis of latest information technology, food production enterprises, government, testing organizations and consumers are integrated into a unified food safety information service cloud platform. The core technology of cloud platform is composed of food safety knowledge system, testing management system, food safety information publicity system as well as mobile application. The food factory inspection data, government inspection data, testing organizations testing data and consumers purchasing information are integrated into food safety and nutrient test big data. Utilizing the data to explore the information that is needed by all the parties, this paper tries to provide a solution to the risk exchange problem faced by Chinas food safety issue. At the same time, food safety problem can be solved through the contribution of different stakeholders.

Authenticity shortage of corporate social responsibility

Has corporate social responsibility (CSR) ever been authentic, and if not, is that bad? This paper critically extends the lively debate on domestic versus overseas CSR in four ways: First, it identifies CSR to be a trouble spot in the global strategy field. Second, it amplifies the scope of a motive-related view on CSR. Third, it offers three disputable answers to the question if CSR cuts into profits. Fourth, it gets an interdisciplinary perspective on the so far rather management-focused board of the CSR boat. The article propels to advance CSR research as it shifts the agreed-upon spotlight of attention to advocate a less mainstream perspective: Does the driving force behind CSR matter?

Olfaction spontaneously highlights visual saliency map

Attention is intrinsic to our perceptual representations of sensory inputs. Best characterized in the visual domain, it is typically depicted as a spotlight moving over a saliency map that topographically encodes strengths of visual features and feedback modulations over the visual scene. By introducing smells to two well-established attentional paradigms, the dot-probe and the visual-search paradigms, we find that a smell reflexively directs attention to the congruent visual image and facilitates visual search of that image without the mediation of visual imagery. Furthermore, such effect is independent of, and can override, top-down bias. We thus propose that smell quality acts as an object feature whose presence enhances the perceptual saliency of that object, thereby guiding the spotlight of visual attention. Our discoveries provide robust empirical evidence for a multimodal saliency map that weighs not only visual but also olfactory inputs.

C. elegans for anti-infective discovery

Widespread use of antimicrobial agents has led to the emergence of multidrug resistant pathogens, which are becoming increasingly common in clinical practice. This underscores the need to discover novel anti-infective compounds. The soil-living nematode Caenorhabditis elegans has proved to be an excellent model host in the search for such compounds. Indeed, this alternative host is successfully being used to identify traditional microbicidal agents, including antihelminthic compounds, as well as novel agents that attenuate microbial virulence or enhance the host's immune response. Thanks to numerous advantageous features, including its amenability to high-throughput automated screens that allow for the detection of bioactive products among thousands of tested substances, the C. elegans model is now in the spotlight of scientific attention.

Management Responses to Social Activism in an Era of Corporate Responsibility: A Case Study

Social activism against companies has evolved in the 50 years since Rachel Carson first put the US chemical industry under pressure to halt the indiscriminate use of the chemical DDT. Many more companies have come under the spotlight of activist attention as the agenda social activists address has expanded, provoked in part by the internationalization of business. During the past fifteen years, companies have begun to formulate corporate responsibility (CR) policies and appointed management teams dedicated to CR, resulting in a change in the way companies interact with social activists. This paper presents findings from a longitudinal case study of managerial responses to social activism targeted at a company with relatively well-advanced CR practices and reputation. The case describes the unfolding of the internal processes over an 8-year period, including the role played by different managers and the tensions in the decision-making processes. The findings emphasize how values and beliefs in the company interact with economic arguments and how those are mediated through functions and relationships in the company and beyond. The paper shows how critical managers’ understanding of the motivations of activists behind the campaign is in shaping their actions. It reveals the paradoxical outcomes that can result from social activism at the level of the firm, the industry, and the field.

The spotlight of attention: shifting, resizing and splitting receptive fields when processing visual motion

Abstract In the visual system receptive fields repre­sent the spatial selectivity of neurons for a given set of visual inputs. Their invariance is thought to be caused by a hardwired in­put configuration, which ensures a stable ‘la­beled line’ code for the spatial position of vi­sual stimuli. On the other hand, changeable receptive fields can provide the visual system with flexibility for allocating processing re­sources in space. The allocation of spatial at­tention, often referred to as the spotlight of attention, is a behavioral equivalent of visu­al receptive fields. It dynamically modulates the spatial sensitivity to visual information as a function of the current attentional focus of the organism. Here we focus on the brain sys­tem for encoding visual motion information and review recent findings documenting in­teractions between spatial attention and re­ceptive fields in the visual cortex of primates. Such interactions create a careful balance be­tween the benefits of invariance with those derived from the attentional modulation of information processing according to the cur­rent behavioral goals.

The spotlight of attention illuminates failed feature‐based expectancies

A well-replicated finding is that visual stimuli presented at an attended location are afforded a processing benefit in the form of speeded reaction times and increased accuracy (Mangun, ; Posner,). This effect has been described using a spotlight metaphor, in which all stimuli within the focus of spatial attention receive facilitated processing, irrespective of other stimulus parameters. However, the spotlight metaphor has been brought into question by a series of combined expectancy studies that demonstrated that the behavioral benefits of spatial attention are contingent on secondary feature-based expectancies (Kingstone,). The present work used an event-related potential (ERP) approach to reveal that the early neural signature of the spotlight of spatial attention is not sensitive to the validity of secondary feature-based expectancies.

Biologically Inspired Object Tracking Using Center-Surround Saliency Mechanisms

A biologically inspired discriminant object tracker is proposed. It is argued that discriminant tracking is a consequence of top-down tuning of the saliency mechanisms that guide the deployment of visual attention. The principle of discriminant saliency is then used to derive a tracker that implements a combination of center-surround saliency, a spatial spotlight of attention, and feature-based attention. In this framework, the tracking problem is formulated as one of continuous target-background classification, implemented in two stages. The first, or learning stage, combines a focus of attention (FoA) mechanism, and bottom-up saliency to identify a maximally discriminant set of features for target detection. The second, or detection stage, uses a feature-based attention mechanism and a target-tuned top-down discriminant saliency detector to detect the target. Overall, the tracker iterates between learning discriminant features from the target location in a video frame and detecting the location of the target in the next. The statistics of natural images are exploited to derive an implementation which is conceptually simple and computationally efficient. The saliency formulation is also shown to establish a unified framework for classifier design, target detection, automatic tracker initialization, and scale adaptation. Experimental results show that the proposed discriminant saliency tracker outperforms a number of state-of-the-art trackers in the literature.

Mapping the timecourse of goal-directed attention to location and colour in human vision

Goal-directed attention prioritises perception of task-relevant stimuli according to location, features, or onset time. In this study we compared the behavioural timecourse of goal-directed selection to locations and colours by varying the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) between cue and target in a strategic cueing paradigm. Participants reported the presence or absence of a target following prior information regarding its location or colour. Results revealed that preparatory selection by colour is more effective at enhancing perceptual sensitivity than selection by location, even though both types of cue provided equivalent overall information. More detailed analysis revealed that this advantage arose due a limitation of spatial attention in maintaining a sufficiently broad focus (>2°) for target detection across multiple stimuli. In contrast, when target stimuli fell within 2° of the spatial attention spotlight, the strategic advantages and speed of spatial and colour attention were equated. Our findings are consistent with the conclusion that, under spatially optimal conditions, prior spatial and colour information are equally proficient at guiding top-down selection. When spatial locations are ambiguous, however, colour-based selection is the more efficient mechanism.

Saccade-confounded image statistics explain visual crowding.

SUMMARYProcessing of shape information in human peripheral visual fields is impeded beyond what can be expected by poorer spatial resolution. Visual crowding—the inability to identify objects in clutter—has been shown to be the primary factor limiting shape perception in peripheral vision. Despite the well documented effects of crowding, its underlying causes are poorly understood. Since spatial attention both facilitates learning of image statistics and directs saccadic eye movements, we propose that the acquisition of image statistics in peripheral visual fields is confounded by eye-movement artifacts. Specifically, the image statistics acquired under a peripherally deployed spotlight of attention is systematically biased by saccade-induced image displacements. These erroneously represented image statistics lead to inappropriate contextual interactions in the periphery and cause crowding.

Eye Position Encoding in Three-Dimensional Space: Integration of Version and Vergence Signals in the Medial Posterior Parietal Cortex

Eye position signals are pivotal in the visuomotor transformations performed by the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), but to date there are few studies addressing the influence of vergence angle upon single PPC neurons. In the present study, we investigated the influence on single neurons of the medial PPC area V6A of vergence and version signals. Single-unit activity was recorded from V6A in two Macaca fascicularis fixating real targets in darkness. The fixation targets were placed at eye level and at different vergence and version angles within the peripersonal space. Few neurons were modulated by version or vergence only, while the majority of cells were affected by both signals. We advance here the hypothesis that gaze-modulated V6A cells are able to encode gazed positions in the three-dimensional space. In single cells, version and vergence influenced the discharge with variable time course. In several cases, the two gaze variables influence neural discharges during only a part of the fixation time, but, more often, their influence persisted through large parts of it. Cells discharging for the first 400-500 ms of fixation could signal the arrival of gaze (and/or of spotlight of attention) in a new position in the peripersonal space. Cells showing a more sustained activity during the fixation period could better signal the location in space of the gazed objects. Both signals are critical for the control of upcoming or ongoing arm movements, such as those needed to reach and grasp objects located in the peripersonal space.

Review of Field techniques for sea ice research, by Hajo Eicken, Rolf Gradinger, Maya Salganek, Kunio Shirasawa, Don Perovich & Matti Leppäranta (2009).

With the rapid decrease of the summer sea-ice cover in the Arctic, sea ice and the work of sea-ice researchers have been regularly in the spotlight of media and public attention in recent years. This book is a timely attempt to create a set of guidelines for the most common techniques for field measurements of sea-ice properties, filling a gap in the recently published sea-ice literature. Led by Hajo Eicken, the editors bring together 29 contributors, a group that mirrors in its composition the collaborative, international and interdisciplinary nature of sea-ice research and forms the base for the wide range of topics. (Published: 24 January 2012) Citation: Polar Research 2012, 31 , 16813, DOI: 10.3402/polar.v31i0.16813

Media Makes Momentum

Relying on 2.2 million articles from 45 national and local U.S. newspapers between 1989 and 2010, we find that firms particularly covered by the media exhibit ceteris paribus significantly stronger momentum. The effect depends on article tone, reverses in the long-run, is more pronounced for stocks with high uncertainty, and stronger in states with high investor individualism. Our findings suggest that media coverage can exacerbate investor biases, leading return predictability to be strongest for firms in the spotlight of public attention. These results collectively lend credibility to an overreaction-based explanation for the momentum effect.