Visual Selective Attention Research Articles

Pre- and postprandial variation in implicit attention to food images reflects appetite and sensory-specific satiety

Implicit attentional processes are biased toward food-related stimuli, with the extent of that bias reflecting relative motivation to eat. These interactions have typically been investigated by comparisons between fasted and sated individuals. In this study, temporal changes in implicit attention to food were assessed in relation to natural, spontaneous changes in appetite occurring before and after an anticipated midday meal. Non-fasted adults performed an emotional blink of attention (EBA) task at intervals, before and after consuming preferred, pre-selected sandwiches to satiety. Participants were required to detect targets within a rapid visual stream, presented after task-irrelevant food (preferred or non-preferred sandwiches, or desserts) or non-food distractor images. All categories of food distractor preferentially captured attention even when appetite levels were low, but became more distracting as appetite increased preprandially, reducing task accuracy maximally as hunger peaked before lunch. Postprandially, attentional capture was markedly reduced for images of the specific sandwich type consumed and, to a lesser extent, for images of other sandwich types that had not been eaten. Attentional capture by images of desserts was unaffected by satiation. These findings support an important role of selective visual attention in the guidance of motivated behaviour. Naturalistic, meal-related changes in appetite are accompanied by changes in implicit attention to visual food stimuli that are easily detected using the EBA paradigm. Preprandial enhancement of attention capture by food cues likely reflects increases in the incentive motivational value of all food stimuli, perhaps providing an implicit index of wanting. Postprandial EBA responses confirm that satiation on a particular food results in relative inattention to that food, supporting an important attentional component in the operation of sensory-specific satiety.

Visual attention mediates the relationship between body satisfaction and susceptibility to the body size adaptation effect.

Body size misperception–the belief that one is larger or smaller than reality–affects a large and growing segment of the population. Recently, studies have shown that exposure to extreme body stimuli results in a shift in the point of subjective normality, suggesting that visual adaptation may be a mechanism by which body size misperception occurs. Yet, despite being exposed to a similar set of bodies, some individuals within a given geographical area will develop body size misperception and others will not. The reason for these individual difference is currently unknown. One possible explanation stems from the observation that women with lower levels of body satisfaction have been found to pay more attention to images of thin bodies. However, while attention has been shown to enhance visual adaptation effects in low (e.g. rotational and linear motion) and high level stimuli (e.g., facial gender), it is not known whether this effect exists in visual adaptation to body size. Here, we test the hypothesis that there is an indirect effect of body satisfaction on the direction and magnitude of the body fat adaptation effect, mediated via visual attention (i.e., selectively attending to images of thin over fat bodies or vice versa). Significant mediation effects were found in both men and women, suggesting that observers’ level of body satisfaction may influence selective visual attention to thin or fat bodies, which in turn influences the magnitude and direction of visual adaptation to body size. This may provide a potential mechanism by which some individuals develop body size misperception–a risk factor for eating disorders, compulsive exercise behaviour and steroid abuse–while others do not.

Visual perception based rate distortion optimization method for high dynamic range video coding

In view of the drastic increase of storage resources and transmission bandwidth requirement for high dynamic range (HDR) video compared to the traditional low dynamic range (LDR) video, we propose a dynamic rate distortion optimization algorithm based on visual perception for HDR Video encoding to improve the performance of high efficiency video coding (HEVC) Main 10 for coding HDR video. With the information of visual selective attention, we design a non-uniform distortion weight distribution strategy to different regions of interest and improve the conventional method of distortion calculation. At the same time, in order to further eliminate the perceptive redundancy in HDR video coding, the texture characteristics of video content are used to adjust Lagrange multipliers adaptively, which is applied to the encoder to dynamically adjust the quantization parameters to realize reasonably the trade-off between coded bits and distortion perception. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can save an average of 7.46% and 6.53% bitrate with the same HDR-visible difference predictor-2.2(HDR-VDP-2.2) and PSNR_DE compared with HEVC Main 10, saving the maximum of 18.52 % and 11.49% respectively. The proposed algorithm can effectively reduce the consumption of the overall bitrates and still maintain the visual quality of the reconstructed HDR video.

Comparisons of visual attention in school-age children with cochlear implants versus hearing peers and normative data

Previous research has found that preschoolers with hearing loss have worse visual attention and elevated rates of behavior problems when compared to typically hearing peers (Barker etal., 2009). However, little is known about these deficits in school-age children with cochlear implants (CIs). We evaluated visual selective attention in school-age children with CIs and hearing peers and examined the link between visual attention and behavior problems. Data were drawn from the Childhood Development after Cochlear Implantation (CDaCI) study, the largest longitudinal, multi-site study of children with CIs. Visual attention was measured using d prime (d') on a continuous performance test (The Gordon CPT), which requires participants to watch a stream of digits and hit a button after seeing a certain target (a 9 following a 1). The CPT captures the probability of a hit (pressing button for a target) vs a false alarm (pressing the button for a non-target) while accounting for chance responding. In addition, predictors of visual attention, including IQ (using Processing Speed and Perceptional Reasoning on the WISC-IV), age at implantation, gender, and device management were examined. Externalizing problems were assessed using parent-report on the BASC-2. Data were drawn from 60 months post-implantation. Children with CIs (n = 106) showed significantly worse visual selective attention than hearing peers. The difference in d' was driven by higher rates of false alarms. In the CI group, the Processing Speed Index on the WISC was correlated with total omissions, total commissions and d'. Within the CI group, d' significantly predicted parent-reported externalizing behavior problems. This finding was primarily driven by elevated Hyperactivity in the CI group. Children with CIs continue to display deficits in visual attention when compared to their hearing peers. Despite improvements in oral language, these problems have critical implications for academic performance and social competence. Currently, cochlear implant teams do not focus on these other dimensions of development and thus, may not be positioned to address them. Assessment of attention and behavior should be incorporated into routine, annual visits soon after implant surgery, and remediation of these deficits should be included in early intervention programs.

EEG & Eye-Tracking Changes With Expertise In A Multi-Vehicle Control Task

EEG & Eye-Tracking Changes With Expertise In A Multi-Vehicle Control Task

Examining the effect of age on auditory enhancement of visual-temporal attention

The temporal properties of visual selective attention change with age as reflected in a longer and deeper impairment of identifying the second of two targets in a rapid stream of visual distracters. In younger adults, identification rates for both targets can be improved by a simultaneous, task irrelevant sound. Research in response time tasks has shown that older participants can benefit more from bimodal stimulation than younger subjects. Here we examine whether this facilitation in older participants can also be found in a setting in which relevant items need to be identified while competing rapid visual input needs to be ignored. The results of the first experiment indicated a trend in the predicted direction, but only for the first target. The second experiment tested whether increasing the probability of a sound to coincide with a target would modulate this trend. As before, the sound improved target identification rates, but an effect of age on the effectiveness of the sound was not evident. These results indicate that audiovisual integration can provide a useful means for improving visual temporal attention also in older adults, but that the gain is not larger in older than in younger adults.

Keeping your eyes on the prize: The selective visual attention of ball sports and action video game players

Keeping your eyes on the prize: The selective visual attention of ball sports and action video game players

Automatic Deficits can lead to executive deficits in ADHD

It has been well documented an executive dysfunction in children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and with Reading Disorder (RD). The purpose of the present study was to test an alternative hypothesis that deficits in executive functioning within ADHD may be partially due to an impairment of the automatic processing. In addition, since the co-occurrence between ADHD and RD, we tested the hypothesis that the automatic processing may be a possible common cognitive factor between ADHD and RD. We investigated the automatic processing of selective visual attention through two experiments. 12 children with ADHD, 17 with ADHD+RD and 29 typically developing children, matched for age and gender, performed two tasks: Visual Information Processing Task and Clock Test. As expected, ADHD and ADHD+RD groups differed from the control group in controlled process task, suggesting a deficit in executive functioning. All clinical subjects also exhibited a lower performance in automatic processes, compared to control group. The results of this study suggest that executive deficits within ADHD can be partially due to an impairment of automatic processing.

Attentional asymmetry between visual hemifields is related to habitual direction of reading and its implications for debate on cause and effects of dyslexia

A major controversy regarding dyslexia is whether any of the many visual and phonological deficits found to be correlated with reading difficulty cause the impairment or result from the reduced amount of reading done by dyslexics. We studied this question by comparing a visual capacity in the left and right visual hemifields in people habitually reading scripts written right-to-left or left-to-right. Selective visual attention is necessary for efficient visual search and also for the sequential recognition of letters in words. Because such attentional allocation during reading depends on the direction in which one is reading, asymmetries in search efficiency may reflect biases arising from the habitual direction of reading. We studied this by examining search performance in three cohorts: (a) left-to-right readers who read English fluently; (b) right-to-left readers fluent in reading Farsi but not any left-to-right script; and (c) bilingual readers fluent in English and in Farsi, Arabic, or Hebrew. Left-to-right readers showed better search performance in the right hemifield and right-to-left readers in the left hemifield, but bilingual readers showed no such asymmetries. Thus, reading experience biases search performance in the direction of reading, which has implications for the cause and effect relationships between reading and cognitive functions.

Concurrent deployment of visual attention and response selection bottleneck in a dual-task: Electrophysiological and behavioural evidence.

Visual attention and response selection are limited in capacity. Here, we investigated whether visual attention requires the same bottleneck mechanism as response selection in a dual-task of the psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm. The dual-task consisted of an auditory two-choice discrimination Task 1 and a conjunction search Task 2, which were presented at variable temporal intervals (stimulus onset asynchrony, SOA). In conjunction search, visual attention is required to select items and to bind their features resulting in a serial search process around the items in the search display (i.e., set size). We measured the reaction time of the visual search task (RT2) and the N2pc, an event-related potential (ERP), which reflects lateralized visual attention processes. If the response selection processes in Task 1 influence the visual attention processes in Task 2, N2pc latency and amplitude would be delayed and attenuated at short SOA compared to long SOA. The results, however, showed that latency and amplitude were independent of SOA, indicating that visual attention was concurrently deployed to response selection. Moreover, the RT2 analysis revealed an underadditive interaction of SOA and set size. We concluded that visual attention does not require the same bottleneck mechanism as response selection in dual-tasks.

Electrical stimulation of macaque lateral prefrontal cortex modulates oculomotor behavior indicative of a disruption of top-down attention

The lateral prefrontal cortex (lPFC) of primates is hypothesized to be heavily involved in decision-making and selective visual attention. Recent neurophysiological evidence suggests that information necessary for an orchestration of those high-level cognitive factors are indeed represented in the lPFC. However, we know little about the specific contribution of sub-networks within lPFC to the deployment of top-down influences that can be measured in extrastriate visual cortex. Here, we systematically applied electrical stimulations to areas 8Av and 45 of two macaque monkeys performing a concurrent goal-directed saccade task. Despite using currents well above saccadic thresholds of the directly adjacent Frontal Eye Fields (FEF), saccades were only rarely evoked by the stimulation. Instead, two types of behavioral effects were observed: Stimulations of caudal sites in 8Av (close to FEF) shortened or prolonged saccadic reaction times, depending on the task-instructed saccade, while rostral stimulations of 8Av/45 seem to affect the relative attentional weighting of saccade targets as well as saccadic reaction times. These results illuminate important differences in the causal involvement of different sub-networks within the lPFC and are most compatible with a stimulation-induced biasing of stimulus processing that accelerates the detection of saccade targets presented ipsilateral to stimulation through a disruption of contralaterally deployed top-down attention.

Learning From News on Different Media Platforms: An Eye-Tracking Experiment

A large number of studies focus on the effects of news consumption on learning. However, we know surprisingly little about how the process of news consumption itself influences learning across different platforms. This experimental study (N = 149) uses eye tracking to examine to what extent news modality (i.e., whether news is presented in a printed newspaper or on a news website) affects visual attention to news, and subsequently, knowledge. Results show that differences in learning between news modalities are indeed driven by variations in attention; exposure to printed news media leads to more diverse learning through increased visual attention, while more selective visual attention to news on websites leads to learning of specific subjects only.

Stimulus-driven and goal-driven effects on Pavlovian associative reward learning

ABSTRACTIt has been shown that pure Pavlovian associative reward learning can elicit value-driven attentional capture. However, in previous studies, task-irrelevant and response-independent reward-signalling stimuli hardly competed for visual selective attention. Here we put Pavlovian reward learning to the test by manipulating the extent to which bottom-up (Experiment 1) and top-down (Experiment 2) processes were involved in this type of learning. In Experiment 1, the stimulus, the colour of which signalled the magnitude of the reward given, was presented simultaneously with another randomly coloured stimulus, so that it did not capture attention in a stimulus-driven manner. In Experiment 2, observers performed an attentionally demanding RSVP-task at the centre of the screen to largely tax goal-driven attentional resources, while a task-irrelevant and response-independent stimulus in the periphery signalled the magnitude of the reward given. Both experiments showed value-driven attentional capture in a non-reward test phase, indicating that the reward-signalling stimuli were imbued with value during the Pavlovian reward conditioning phases. This suggests that pure Pavlovian reward conditioning can occur even when (1) competition prevents attention being automatically allocated to the reward-signalling stimulus in a stimulus-driven manner, and (2) attention is occupied by a demanding task, leaving little goal-driven attentional resources available to strategically select the reward-signalling stimulus. The observed value-driven attentional capture effects appeared to be similar for observers who could and could not explicitly report the stimulus–reward contingencies. Altogether, this study provides insight in the conditions under which mere stimulus–reward contingencies in the environment can be learned to affect future behaviour.

Selective Attention, Working Memory, and Executive Function as Potential Independent Sources of Cognitive Dysfunction in Schizophrenia.

People with schizophrenia demonstrate impairments in selective attention, working memory, and executive function. Given the overlap in these constructs, it is unclear if these represent distinct impairments or different manifestations of one higher-order impairment. To examine this question, we administered tasks from the basic cognitive neuroscience literature to measure visual selective attention, working memory capacity, and executive function in 126 people with schizophrenia and 122 healthy volunteers. Patients demonstrated deficits on all tasks with the exception of selective attention guided by strong bottom-up inputs. Although the measures of top-down control of selective attention, working memory, and executive function were all intercorrelated, several sources of evidence indicate that working memory and executive function are separate sources of variance. Specifically, both working memory and executive function independently contributed to the discrimination of group status and independently accounted for variance in overall general cognitive ability as assessed by the MATRICS battery. These two cognitive functions appear to be separable features of the cognitive impairments observed in schizophrenia.

Extensive Tonotopic Mapping across Auditory Cortex Is Recapitulated by Spectrally Directed Attention and Systematically Related to Cortical Myeloarchitecture.

Auditory selective attention is vital in natural soundscapes. But it is unclear how attentional focus on the primary dimension of auditory representation—acoustic frequency—might modulate basic auditory functional topography during active listening. In contrast to visual selective attention, which is supported by motor-mediated optimization of input across saccades and pupil dilation, the primate auditory system has fewer means of differentially sampling the world. This makes spectrally-directed endogenous attention a particularly crucial aspect of auditory attention. Using a novel functional paradigm combined with quantitative MRI, we establish in male and female listeners that human frequency-band-selective attention drives activation in both myeloarchitectonically estimated auditory core, and across the majority of tonotopically mapped nonprimary auditory cortex. The attentionally driven best-frequency maps show strong concordance with sensory-driven maps in the same subjects across much of the temporal plane, with poor concordance in areas outside traditional auditory cortex. There is significantly greater activation across most of auditory cortex when best frequency is attended, versus ignored; the same regions do not show this enhancement when attending to the least-preferred frequency band. Finally, the results demonstrate that there is spatial correspondence between the degree of myelination and the strength of the tonotopic signal across a number of regions in auditory cortex. Strong frequency preferences across tonotopically mapped auditory cortex spatially correlate with R1-estimated myeloarchitecture, indicating shared functional and anatomical organization that may underlie intrinsic auditory regionalization.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Perception is an active process, especially sensitive to attentional state. Listeners direct auditory attention to track a violin's melody within an ensemble performance, or to follow a voice in a crowded cafe. Although diverse pathologies reduce quality of life by impacting such spectrally directed auditory attention, its neurobiological bases are unclear. We demonstrate that human primary and nonprimary auditory cortical activation is modulated by spectrally directed attention in a manner that recapitulates its tonotopic sensory organization. Further, the graded activation profiles evoked by single-frequency bands are correlated with attentionally driven activation when these bands are presented in complex soundscapes. Finally, we observe a strong concordance in the degree of cortical myelination and the strength of tonotopic activation across several auditory cortical regions.

Comparing the performance of people who stutter and people who do not stutter on the Test of Everyday Attention

ABSTRACTIntroduction: Compelling findings into the relationship between stuttering and attentional ability have started to emerge, with some child and adult studies indicating poorer attentional ability among people who stutter (PWS). The purpose of the present research was to provide a more complete picture of the attentional abilities of PWS, as well as to gather insights into their individual attentional performance.Method: We compared the attentional ability of PWS to that of people who do not stutter (PWNS) by using the Test of Everyday Attention (TEA). TEA is a clinical assessment battery with a very good validity and reliability comprising 8 subtests that pose differential demands on sustained attention, selective attention, attentional switching, and divided attention. Fifty age- and gender-matched PWS and PWNS (aged 19–77 years) took part in the study. Importantly, we also examined stuttering severity in the PWS group.Results: PWS performed significantly worse on tasks tapping into visual selective and divided attentional resources. Furthermore despite failing to reach statistical significance, the results also revealed an interesting trend for stuttering to be associated with poorer performance on two subtests measuring attentional switching and one tapping into auditory selective attention. Moreover, as hypothesized, there was also a negative association between stuttering severity and performance on two TEA subtests measuring visual selective attention. Finally, the type of TEA test variant produced no significant effect on performance.Conclusions: We interpret these results as indicative of stuttering being associated with poorer performance on tasks measuring certain attentional abilities. These tie in well with theoretical models identifying speech production as particularly attention-demanding in stuttering or approaches placing attentional dysfunction at the heart of the condition. The present research also has practical implications for the use of attentional training to improve fluency.

The exogenous and endogenous control of attentional focusing.

Selective visual attention involves prioritizing both the location (orienting) and distribution (focusing) of processing. To date, much more research has examined attentional orienting than focusing. One of the most well-established findings is that orienting can be exogenous, as when a unique change in luminance draws attention to a spatial location (e.g., Theeuwes in Atten Percept Psychophys 51:599-606, 1992; Yantis and Jonides in J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 10:601, 1984), and endogenous, as when a red distractor shape diverts attention when one is looking for a red target (e.g., Bacon and Egeth in Percept Psychophys 55:485-496, 1994; Folk et al. in J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 18:1030, 1992). Here we ask whether attentional focusing-the broadening and contracting of prioritized processing-is influenced by the same two factors. Our methodology involved a dual-stream attentional blink task; participants monitored two spatially separated streams of items for two targets that could appear unpredictably either in the same stream or in opposite streams. The spatial distribution of attention was assessed by examining second-target accuracy in relation to inter-target lag and target location (same or opposite streams). In Experiment 1, we found that attentional contracting was more rapid when the targets differed in luminance from the distractor items. In Experiments 2 and 3, we found that the rate of attentional contracting was slower when there were task-relevant distractors in the stream opposite the first target. These results indicate that the rate of attentional focusing, like orienting, can be modulated by both exogenous and endogenous mechanisms.

Augmented reality and cognition: Visual attention and information selection in a monocular head-up display

Augmented reality and cognition: Visual attention and information selection in a monocular head-up display

The Effects of Unique Blur/Clarity Contrast on Visual Selective Attention as Measured by Eye Movements: Strong Clarity Capture and Weak Blur Repulsion

The Effects of Unique Blur/Clarity Contrast on Visual Selective Attention as Measured by Eye Movements: Strong Clarity Capture and Weak Blur Repulsion

Modulation of alpha power reveals interaction between top-down and bottom-up effects during visual selective attention

Modulation of alpha power reveals interaction between top-down and bottom-up effects during visual selective attention