Automatic Attention: Effortless, Perceptual, and Personal

Impairments in self-representation are relevant to the expression of psychosis. To date, the characteristics and neural mechanisms of self-impairment in schizophrenia remain unclear. To this end, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to measure brain activity in 56 first-episode patients with schizophrenia and 56 healthy controls. Participants judged personal trait adjectives regarding themselves, their mothers, or a public person, followed by an unexpected old/new recognition test. The recognition score for mother-reference adjectives was lower than that for self-reference adjectives in patients, while the control group showed comparatively high recognition scores for both self- and mother-referential adjectives. In addition, control subjects recognized more negative words, while patients remembered more positive words. ERP data revealed that controls exhibited typical task effects (self-reference = mother-reference > other-reference) during both automatic attention and effortful encoding periods [indexed by P2 and the late positive potential (LPP), respectively]. In contrast, patients only exhibited the task effect in the P2 amplitude. Moreover, controls exhibited larger P2 amplitudes during encoding negative than positive words, whereas patients had enhanced LPP amplitudes during memory retrieval of positive compared to negative words. These findings demonstrated self-representation dysfunction in first-episode schizophrenic patients in mother (the intimate other) referential processing and the absence of a negative memory bias.

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Exploring reward-related attention selectivity deficits in Parkinson’s disease

Scientific Reports ◽

10.1038/s41598-021-97526-7 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Matthew J. D. Pilgrim ◽

Zhen-Yi Andy Ou ◽

Madeleine Sharp

Keyword(s):

Parkinson’S Disease ◽

Parkinson's Disease ◽

Cognitive Processes ◽

Search Task ◽

Visual Search Task ◽

Adaptive Modulation ◽

Attention Capture ◽

Reward Value ◽

Automatic Attention ◽

Reward Information

AbstractAn important aspect of managing a limited cognitive resource like attention is to use the reward value of stimuli to prioritize the allocation of attention to higher-value over lower-value stimuli. Recent evidence suggests this depends on dopaminergic signaling of reward. In Parkinson’s disease, both reward sensitivity and attention are impaired, but whether these deficits are directly related to one another is unknown. We tested whether Parkinson’s patients use reward information when automatically allocating their attention and whether this is modulated by dopamine replacement. We compared patients, tested both ON and OFF dopamine replacement medication, to older controls using a standard attention capture task. First, participants learned the different reward values of stimuli. Then, these reward-associated stimuli were used as distractors in a visual search task. We found that patients were generally distracted by the presence of the distractors but that the degree of distraction caused by the high-value and low-value distractors was similar. Furthermore, we found no evidence to support the possibility that dopamine replacement modulates the effect of reward on automatic attention allocation. Our results suggest a possible inability in Parkinson’s patients to use the reward value of stimuli when automatically allocating their attention, and raise the possibility that reward-driven allocation of resources may affect the adaptive modulation of other cognitive processes.

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Different Top-Down Goals Modulate Early Stage of Attention Bias: Irrelevant Task Suppresses the N170 of Automatic Attention Allocation to Threat Faces

10.21203/rs.3.rs-121215/v1 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Haoran Dou ◽

Limei Liang ◽

Jie Ma ◽

Jiachen Lu ◽

Wenhai Zhang ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Early Stage ◽

Attention Bias ◽

Neural Mechanism ◽

Attention Allocation ◽

Top Down ◽

Neutral Face ◽

Fearful Face ◽

Relevant Task ◽

The Difference ◽

Automatic Attention

Abstract Recent research has evidenced that stimulus-driven attention bias for threat can be modulated by top-down goals. However, it remains unclear how different top-down goals affect the early stage of attention processing and its early neural mechanism. We collected electroencephalographic data from 28 healthy volunteers during four inconsistent levels in a modified spatial cueing task according to cue validity and task relevance. Our data revealed that reaction time(RT) to the target in the irrelevant task were much slower than that in the relevant task. In the irrelevant task, we did not find the difference between the RTs to the fearful and neutral face. In the relevant task, we found RTs of fearful face were faster than that of neutral face in valid cue condition(weak inconsistent level), whereas the RTs of fearful face were slower than that of neutral face in invalid cue condition(medium inconsistent level). The ERPs results showed that in relevant task(weak, medium inconsistent levels), fearful face in cue position of the target evoked larger N170 amplitudes than neutral face did, whereas this effect was suppressed in irrelevant task(strong, very strong inconsistent levels). Besides, fearful face in cue position of the target also evoked larger vertex positive potential (VPP) amplitudes than the neutral face did in valid cue condition( weak inconsistent level). These results suggest that irrelevant task may inhibit the early attention allocation to the fearful face. Furthermore, the top-down processing modulates the early attention bias for threatening faces.

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Preferred Hemifields Learn Less

Perception ◽

10.1068/v970273 ◽

1997 ◽

Vol 26 (1_suppl) ◽

pp. 308-308

Author(s):

M Pavlovskaya ◽

H Ring ◽

Z Groswasser ◽

S Hochstein

Keyword(s):

Target Element ◽

Gray Background ◽

Fixation Cross ◽

Black Background ◽

The Right ◽

Almost All ◽

Automatic Attention ◽

First Session

Subjects were tested on orientation and colour pop-out tasks. Orientation pop-out stimuli were 3 × 3, 5 × 5, or 7 × 7 arrays of vertical light (white) bars (on a black background) with a target element of diagonal (45°) orientation (present on half of the trials). Colour pop-out stimuli consisted of 60° oriented bars with blue distractor and yellow target elements (on a gray background). Inter-element distance was 40 min arc. The arrays were presented eccentrically, in the right or left hemifield, so that the distance of their centres from the fixation cross was 2.5 – 6.5 deg. First we tested performance in the right and left hemifields, with interleaved trials. Most subjects (7/9) had a right-hemifield preference for the orientation and/or colour task. The remaining 2 had a left-hemifield preference. For the six subjects tested on both tasks, all but one had more laterality for colour than for orientation. Thus, for the 15 conditions tested (9 orientation + 6 colour), most (8/15) showed better performance in the right hemifield; the minority (2/15) were better on the left; and a third were about equal in both hemifields. Subjects were recalled for a second session with the same tasks, to test improvement due to first session training. Almost all showed significantly greater improvement for the non-preferred hemifield. This effect was so strong that often preference was switched. Surprisingly, preferred-hemifield performance actually declined for many subjects. Thus, the effect seems related to competition, and perhaps an automatic attention-directing mechanism.

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