Holistic processing of faces: Perceptual and decisional components.

Researchers have used several composite face paradigms to assess holistic processing of faces. In the selective attention paradigm, participants decide whether one face part (e.g., top) is the same as a previously seen face part. Their judgment is affected by whether the irrelevant part of the test face is the same as or different than the relevant part of the study face. This failure of selective attention implies holistic processing. However, the authors show that this task alone cannot distinguish between perceptual and decisional sources of holism. The distinction can be addressed by the complete identification paradigm, in which both face parts are judged to be same or different, combined with analyses based on general recognition theory (F. G. Ashby & J. T. Townsend, 1986). The authors used a different paradigm, sequential responses, to relate these 2 paradigms empirically and theoretically. Sequential responses produced the same results as did selective attention and complete identification. Moreover, disruptions of holistic processing by systematic misalignment of the faces corresponded with systematic and significant changes in the decisional components, but not in the perceptual components, that were extracted using general recognition theory measures. This finding suggests a significant decisional component of holistic face processing in the composite face task. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of age and task demands on visual selective attention.

We investigated whether young and older adults differ on measures of interference (INT), negative priming (NP), and inhibition of return (IOR) on a spatial selective attention task that gradually increased in cognitive demand, from simple perceptual matching to letter identification. For both groups, INT increased and IOR decreased with task demand; while NP remained stable. We found age-related increases in INT, NP, and IOR, independent of task demand. However, only between-groups differences in IOR remained after correcting for age-related slowing in response times. Finally, we found no association between our measures of attention across groups, suggesting negligible overlap between INT, NP, and IOR. Our results indicate that attention is selectively and independently influenced by age and task demands, with both effects dependent on how attention is measured. These findings shed light on the “frontal hypothesis of aging.” (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Comparative effects of different test day challenges on performance in the 5-choice serial reaction time task.

The 5-choice serial reaction time task (5-CSRTT) is a valuable cognitive test that permits the simultaneous assessment of several different cognitive modalities, including attention, impulse control, processing speed, and cognitive flexibility. Increasing task difficulty on test days through various challenges can further enhance the versatility of this test by selectively enhancing the cognitive load on different aspects of the task. Systematic comparisons of the effects of different test day challenges on 5-CSRTT performance are essential to verify how these challenges affect different task measures and which manipulations are best suited for future studies of different aspects of cognition. We trained Wistar rats in the 5-CSRTT under standard conditions, then challenged them on the test days by (1) decreasing the duration of the stimulus to be detected, (2) increasing the time interval between trials (intertrial interval, ITI), (3) randomly varying the ITI, or (4) adding a flashing light distractor. All test day challenges produced distinct profiles of performance disruption that reflected differential effects on different cognitive modalities. Decreased stimulus duration selectively impaired attentional performance, while increased ITI increased impulsive-like premature responses and decreased trials completed. Variable ITI induced only mild, nonsignificant disruptions in response inhibition and processing speed, while the flashing light distractor produced comprehensive impairment affecting multiple aspects of 5-CSRTT performance, including disrupted attention and increased premature and timeout responses. This improved understanding of the effects of different test day challenges in the 5-CSRTT will allow researchers to use these manipulations of a valuable cognitive test to their full potential. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Chronological age and age-related cognitive deficits are associated with an increase in multiple types of driving errors in late life.

Objective: Older driver research has mostly focused on identifying that small proportion of older drivers who are unsafe. Little is known about how normal cognitive changes in aging affect driving in the wider population of adults who drive regularly. We evaluated the association of cognitive function and age with driving errors. Method: A sample of 266 drivers aged 70 to 88 years were assessed on abilities that decline in normal aging (visual attention, processing speed, inhibition, reaction time, task switching) and the UFOV?, which is a validated screening instrument for older drivers. Participants completed an on-road driving test. Generalized linear models were used to estimate the associations of cognitive factors with specific driving errors and number of errors in self-directed and instructor navigated conditions. Results: All error types increased with chronological age. Reaction time was not associated with driving errors in multivariate analyses. A cognitive factor measuring speeded selective attention and switching was uniquely associated with the most errors types. The UFOV? predicted blind-spot errors and errors on dual carriageways. After adjusting for age, education, and gender, the cognitive factors explained 7% of variance in the total number of errors in the instructor-navigated condition and 4% of variance in the self-navigated condition. Conclusion: We conclude that among older drivers, errors increase with age and are associated with speeded selective attention, particularly when that requires attending to the stimuli in the periphery of the visual field, task switching, errors inhibiting responses, and visual discrimination. These abilities should be the target of cognitive training. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual abilities and task demands in relation to performance and satisfaction on two repetitive monitoring tasks.

Hypothesized that task satisfaction is related to individual performance-relevant abilities. Two repetitive monitoring tasks were designed, differing only with respect to the demands placed on specific abilities. Each task was performed by 50 male college students for 3 hrs. A measure of perceptual style predicted performance in the less demanding task, whereas measures of perceptual style, general intelligence, selective attention, and memory predicted performance in the more demanding task. The task-related ability was negatively related to satisfaction in the simple task, whereas curvilinear relationships between abilities and satisfaction were found in the more complex task. Implications for personnel selection and job design are discussed. (28 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Intactness of inhibitory attentional mechanisms following severe closed-head injury.

Attentional problems are a common sequelae of closed-head injury (CHI). Research in the area of selective attention has pointed to the role of inhibitory mechanisms in the suppression of irrelevant information. In the current study, a negative priming paradigm was used to assess the inhibitory mechanisms of individuals suffering from a severe CHI. Twenty participants with severe CHIs (greater than 1 year postinjury) and 20 matched controls completed a negative priming task, as well as several other standardized tests of cognitive functioning. Within the negative priming task, 2 conditions were used to elicit information regarding facilitation by attended and ignored information and 1 condition was used to elicit inhibition of ignored information, as compared with a neutral control condition. Despite poorer performances on several tests of attention, there were no significant differences in the amount of inhibition displayed by the CHI participants as compared with the controls. Findings suggest that inhibitory processing deficits may not underlie the selective attention difficulties commonly seen following a severe CHI. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Multidimensional psychophysics and selective attention in animals.

Notes that the hypothesis that animals selectively attend developed mainly in explanations of certain conditioning and discrimination learning phenomena. This hypothesis of selective attention is evaluated against a continuity (nonattentional) theory, and most, if not all, facts of simple learning can be accounted for by a nonattentional analysis. Thus, the usefulness of selective attention as an explanatory notion remains in doubt, and few phenomena can be regarded as exemplars of selective attention. In contrast, many examples of selective attention phenomena have been discovered in human information processing experiments. Emphasis in these experiments is on instructional and stimulus variables as they affect steady-state performance rather than response learning. Recent research with animals, modeled on human steady-state tasks, promises to provide similar instances of selective attention effects in performance. (2 p ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Priming from distractors in rapid serial visual presentation is modulated by image properties and attention.

We investigated distractor processing in a dual-target rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task containing familiar objects, by measuring repetition priming from a priming distractor (PD) to Target 2 (T2). Priming from a visually identical PD was contrasted with priming from a PD in a different orientation from T2. We also tested the effect of attention on distractor processing, by placing the PD either within or outside the attentional blink (AB). PDs outside the AB induced positive priming when they were in a different orientation to T2 and no priming, or negative priming, when they were perceptually identical to T2. PDs within the AB induced positive priming regardless of orientation. These findings demonstrate (1) that distractors are processed at multiple levels of representation; (2) that the view-specific representations of distractors are actively suppressed during RSVP; and (3) that this suppression fails in the absence of attention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Neural Gate Keeping: The Role of Interhemispheric Interactions in Resource Allocation and Selective Filtering.

The corpus callosum has been proposed to contribute to attention by modulating resource allocation between the hemispheres and filtering interhemispheric signal transmission (M. T. Banich, 1998). The resource allocation hypothesis predicts that interhemispheric interactions become more advantageous with increasing resource demands. The selective filtering hypothesis predicts that interhemispheric interactions become less advantageous as filtering requirements increase. The authors tested both predictions by comparing within- and across-hemisphere letter matching under dual-task (Experiment 1) and selective attention conditions (Experiment 2). Task-specific resource demands (i.e., letter processing load) alter the bihemispheric advantage, but the general demand imposed by an unrelated secondary task does not. Filtering requirements influenced the advantage from interhemispheric interactions, providing new evidence for the role of the corpus callosum in selective attention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Quantitative modeling of visual attention processes in patients with Parkinson's disease: Effects of stimulus integrality on selective attention and dimensional integration.

Parkinson's disease (PD) patients and normal controls (NCs) were administered a series of visual attention tasks. The dimensional integration task required integration of information from 2 stimulus dimensions. The selective attention task required selective attention to 1 stimulus dimension while ignoring the other stimulus dimension. Both integral- and separable-dimension stimuli were examined. A series of quantitative models of attentional processing was applied to each participant's data. The results suggest that (a) PD patients were not impaired in integrating information from 2 stimulus dimensions, (b) PD patients were impaired in selective attention, (c) selective attention deficits in PD patients were not due to perceptual interference, and (d) PD patients were affected by manipulations of stimulus integrality and separability in much the same way as were NCs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Visual word recognition: A dissociation of lexical and semantic processing.

These experiments illustrate 2 new dissociations in word-recognition tasks. In one, relatedness facilitated lexical decision but impaired searching for a common letter in the same pairs of words (a cross-over interaction between relatedness and task). In the other dissociation, lexicality facilitated performance (words processed faster than nonwords) while relatedness impaired performance (related words processed slower than unrelated words) in the letter search task. Two classes of explanation are discussed. In the first, the perception of relatedness serves to focus attention to the word level, thereby making explicit letter level processing more difficult and/or increasing the number of competing lexical entries via priming. In the second, spreading inhibition makes related words more difficult to process than unrelated words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of attending selectively to the spatial position of reflex-eliciting and reflex-modulating stimuli.

The question of whether automatic, sensory processes can be modified by selectively directing attention to stimuli was addressed by comparing effects on brainstem reflexes that share a common efferent pathway but have distinct afferent limbs. Subjects judged the duration of brief but intense blink-eliciting tones (Experiment 1) or weak tones preceding a blink-eliciting air puff at interstimulus intervals producing blink inhibition (Experiment 2). Tones occurred unpredictably at left, right, or midline loci; designation of the target location varied across blocks of trials. Latency of blinks to lateralized blink-eliciting targets was facilitated selectively, and the magnitude of blinks evoked by air puff following lateralized prestimulus targets was inhibited selectively. There was no evidence for a midline selective effect. Results appear to support a preset differential processing of stimuli in sensory pathways at low, possibly subcortical, levels and the consequent modification of obligatory, automatic processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Early social deprivation disrupts attentional, but not affective, shifts in rats.

This study examined the effects of early social deprivation in rats in 2 dissociable forms of inhibitory control of behavior that operate at 2 different levels of response selection: reversing the assignment of stimulus–reward associations within perceptual dimensions (affective shifts) and switching selective attention from 1 perceptual dimension to another (attentional shifts). Isolated Ss (isolates) and social controls (socials) were individually trained to spatial and nonspatial visual discrimination criteria on a radial arm maze. Whereas isolates and socials differed in neither acquisition nor reversal of both versions of the task, isolates were selectively impaired in shifting from spatial to nonspatial discrimination and vice versa. These findings demonstrate that isolation rearing selectively disrupts inhibitory control in attentional selection but leaves inhibitory control in affective processing intact. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Visual attention in HIV-1 infection.

27 nondemented HIV-seropositive men and 13 seronegative controls performed 2 versions of a spatial attention task that engaged either automatic or controlled attentional processing. Ss also performed a 3rd task requiring divided attention, which tested for potential deficits in attentional resources. HIV-seropositive symptomatic Ss were impaired on the automatic processing task, whereas asymptomatic Ss performed the task normally compared with controls. In contrast, no differences were observed among the 3 groups on the controlled attention task. However, both seropositive groups showed deficits on the divided attention task. These results suggest that deficits in selective attention are present early in the course of HIV-1 infection. The most prominent impairment is seen on tasks that are highly demanding of attentional resources, whereas deficits in automatic processing develop later in the disease process. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The processing of duration and intensity cues to prominence

This paper presents results from two experiments designed to show how duration and intensity are processed during speech perception. Duration and intensity are two physical dimensions which are known to interact psychoacoustically in the perception of both length (a term that will be used for perceived duration) and loudness. The first experiment, a selective attention task, shows that length and loudness are processed as a unit [integrally, in the terms of Garner, The Processing of Information and Structure (Erlbaum, Potomac, MD, 1974)], but that the integrality is asymmetric: Extracting length information appears to be easier than extracting loudness information. The results of the first experiment make the prediction that listeners would not use loudness by itself in making prominence judgments, since the extraction of loudness in the presence of duration variation appears to require a (relatively) high processing load. The second experiment, a traditional trading relation experiment in which duration and intensity were varied orthogonally, appears to bear out this prediction. Listeners' responses were predicted from computed measures of length and loudness in a linear multiple regression analysis. Results show a negligible independent contribution of loudness to listeners' responses. Listeners' behavior is best predicted by computed measures of length.     

Event-related potentials during visual selective attention in children of alcoholics

Event-related potentials were recorded from 7- to 18-year-old children of alcoholics (COAs, n = 50) and age- and sex-matched control children (n = 50) while they performed a visual selective attention task. The task was to attend selectively to stimuli with a specified color (red or blue) in an attempt to detect the occurrence of target stimuli. COAs manifested a smaller P3b amplitude to attended-target stimuli over the parietal and occipital scalp than did the controls. A more specific analysis indicated that both the attentional relevance and the target properties of the eliciting stimulus determined the observed P3b amplitude differences between COAs and controls. In contrast, no significant group differences were observed in attention-related earlier occurring event-related potential components, referred to as frontal selection positivity, selection negativity, and N2b. These results represent neurophysiological evidence that COAs suffer from deficits at a late (semantic) level of visual selective information processing that are unlikely a consequence of deficits at earlier (sensory) levels of selective processing. The findings support the notion that a reduced visual P3b amplitude in COAs represents a high-level processing dysfunction indicating their increased vulnerability to alcoholism.     

Distinguishing between automaticity and attention in the processing of emotionally significant stimuli.

There is contradicting evidence as to whether irrelevant but significant emotional stimuli can be processed outside the focus of attention. In the current study, participants were asked to ignore emotional and neutral pictures while performing a competing task. In Experiment 1, orienting of attention to distracting pictures was manipulated via a peripheral cue. In Experiment 2, attentional load was varied, either leaving spare attention to process the distracting pictures or, alternatively, depleting attentional resources. Although all pictures were task irrelevant, negative pictures were found to interfere more with performance in comparison to neutral pictures. This finding suggests that processing of negative stimuli is automatic in the sense that it does not require execution of conscious monitoring. However, interference occurred only when sufficient attention was available for picture processing. Hence, processing of negative pictures was dependent on sufficient attentional resources. This suggests that processing of emotionally significant stimuli is automatic yet requires attention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stereotypic biases in social decision making and memory: Testing process models of stereotype use.

Two information-processing mechanisms that could potentially contribute to judgmental discrimination against the members of stereotyped social groups were examined in 2 experiments, using a mock juror decision-making task. Both postulated mechanisms involve biased processing of judgment-relevant evidence. The interpretation hypothesis asserts that the activation of stereotypic concepts influences the perceived probative implications of other evidence. The selective processing hypothesis asserts that stereotype-consistent evidence is processed more extensively than is inconsistent evidence. Judgment and memory data from the 1st experiment supported the general notion that stereotype-based discrimination emerges from biased evidence processing. The specific pattern of results supported selective processing rather than interpretation biases as the critical process underlying observed judgmental discrimination. The 2nd experiment corroborated this conclusion by showing that a manipulation that prevents selective processing of the evidence effectively eliminated biases in judgments and recall pertaining to stereotyped targets. Implications for a general understanding of stereotyping and discrimination are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

You must see the point: Automatic processing of cues to the direction of social attention.

Four experiments explored the processing of pointing gestures comprising hand and combined head and gaze cues to direction. The cross-modal interference effect exerted by pointing hand gestures on the processing of spoken directional words, first noted by S. R. H. Langton, C. O'Malley, and V. Bruce (see record 1996-06577-002), was found to be moderated by the orientation of the gesturer's head-gaze (Experiment 1). Hand and head cues also produced bidirectional interference effects in a within-modalities version of the task (Experiment 2). These findings suggest that both head-gaze and hand cues to direction are processed automatically and in parallel up to a stage in processing where a directional decision is computed. In support of this model, head-gaze cues produced no influence on nondirectional decisions to social emblematic gestures in Experiment 3 but exerted significant interference effects on directional responses to arrows in Experiment 4. It is suggested that the automatic analysis of head, gaze, and pointing gestures occurs because these directional signals are processed as cues to the direction of another individual's social attention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)