Drawn to Distraction: Anxiety Impairs Neural Suppression of Known Distractor Features in Visual Search

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Christine Salahub ◽  
Stephen M. Emrich
Keyword(s):  
Visual Search ◽  
Attentional Control ◽  
Template Matching ◽  
Time Course ◽  
High Anxiety ◽  
Guided Search ◽  
Distractor Processing ◽  
Search And Destroy

Abstract When searching for a target, it is possible to suppress the features of a known distractor. This suppression may prevent distractor processing altogether or only after the distractor initially captures attention (i.e., search and destroy). However, suppression may be impaired in individuals with attentional control deficits, such as in high anxiety. In this study (n = 48), we used ERPs to examine the time course of attentional enhancement and suppression when participants were given pretrial information about target or distractor features. Consistent with our hypothesis, we found that individuals with higher levels of anxiety had lower neural measures of suppressing the template-matching distractor, instead showing enhanced processing. These findings indicate that individuals with anxiety are more likely to use a search-and-destroy mechanism of negative templates—highlighting the importance of attentional control abilities in distractor-guided search.

scholarly journals Drawn to distraction: Anxiety impairs neural suppression of known distractor featuresin visual search

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Salahub ◽  
Stephen Emrich
Keyword(s):  
Visual Search ◽  
Attentional Control ◽  
Template Matching ◽  
Time Course ◽  
Event Related Potentials ◽  
High Anxiety ◽  
Guided Search ◽  
Distractor Processing ◽  
Related Potentials

When searching for a target, it is possible to suppress the features of a known distractor. This suppression may occur early, preventing distractor processing altogether, or only after the distractor initially captures attention. The time course of suppression may also differ as a function of attentional control abilities, such as is seen in individuals with high anxiety. In the present study (N = 48), we used event-related potentials to examine the time course of attentional enhancement and suppression when participants were given pre-trial information about target or distractor features. Consistent with our hypothesis, we found that individuals with higher levels of anxiety showed lower neural measures of suppressing the template-matching distractor, with greater evidence of enhancement. Despite this deficit in suppression, later distractor inhibition remained intact. These findings indicate that neural suppression of template-matching distractors is impaired in anxiety – highlighting the role of attentional control abilities in distractor-guided search.

Converging Evidence That Neural Plasticity Underlies Transcranial Direct-Current Stimulation

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 146-157
Author(s):  
Chong Zhao ◽  
Geoffrey F. Woodman
Keyword(s):  
Visual Search ◽  
Direct Current ◽  
Neural Plasticity ◽  
Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation ◽  
Time Course ◽  
Memory Task ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Visual Stream ◽  
Direct Current Stimulation ◽  
The Brain

It is not definitely known how direct-current stimulation causes its long-lasting effects. Here, we tested the hypothesis that the long time course of transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) is because of the electrical field increasing the plasticity of the brain tissue. If this is the case, then we should see tDCS effects when humans need to encode information into long-term memory, but not at other times. We tested this hypothesis by delivering tDCS to the ventral visual stream of human participants during different tasks (i.e., recognition memory vs. visual search) and at different times during a memory task. We found that tDCS improved memory encoding, and the neural correlates thereof, but not retrieval. We also found that tDCS did not change the efficiency of information processing during visual search for a certain target object, a task that does not require the formation of new connections in the brain but instead relies on attention and object recognition mechanisms. Thus, our findings support the hypothesis that direct-current stimulation modulates brain activity by changing the underlying plasticity of the tissue.

An EEG study of the combined effects of top-down and bottom-up attentional selection under varying task difficulty

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Einat Rashal ◽  
Mehdi Senoussi ◽  
Elisa Santandrea ◽  
Suliann Ben Hamed ◽  
Emiliano Macaluso ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Search ◽  
Attentional Control ◽  
Task Difficulty ◽  
Target Selection ◽  
Attentional Selection ◽  
Combined Effects ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Search Tasks

This work reports an investigation of the effect of combined top-down and bottom-up attentional control sources, using known attention-related EEG components that are thought to reflect target selection (N2pc) and distractor suppression (PD), in easy and difficult visual search tasks.

Young skilled deaf readers have an enhanced perceptual span in reading

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 291-301 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathalie N Bélanger ◽  
Michelle Lee ◽  
Elizabeth R Schotter
Keyword(s):  
Visual Attention ◽  
Attentional Control ◽  
Time Course ◽  
Visual Stimuli ◽  
Reading Level ◽  
Deaf Children ◽  
Moving Window ◽  
Perceptual Span ◽  
Deaf Readers ◽  
Deaf Adults

Recently, Bélanger, Slattery, Mayberry and Rayner showed, using the moving-window paradigm, that profoundly deaf adults have a wider perceptual span during reading relative to hearing adults matched on reading level. This difference might be related to the fact that deaf adults allocate more visual attention to simple stimuli in the parafovea. Importantly, this reorganization of visual attention in deaf individuals is already manifesting in deaf children. This leads to questions about the time course of the emergence of an enhanced perceptual span (which is under attentional control) in young deaf readers. The present research addressed this question by comparing the perceptual spans of young deaf readers (age 7-15) and young hearing readers (age 7-15). Young deaf readers, like deaf adults, were found to have a wider perceptual span relative to their hearing peers matched on reading level, suggesting that strong and early reorganization of visual attention in deaf individuals goes beyond the processing of simple visual stimuli and emerges into more cognitively complex tasks, such as reading.

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