The maintained attention assessment in patients affected by Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome: a reliable biomarker?

The maintained attention is the cause of great functional limitations in CFS/ME, a disease that mainly affects women in the central period of life. Cognitive function is explored using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, the maintained attention using the Toulouse-Piéron test with which the Global Index of Attention and Perception (GIAP) is obtained, the fatigue using the visual analog scale and the perception of effort using the modified Borg scale. The final sample were 84 patients (66 women/18 men) who met diagnostic criteria (Fukuda-1994, Carruthers-2011) and 22 healthy controls (14 women/8 men). Most of patients maintain normal cognitive function, showing low or very low attention score in the 70% of patients with a marked cognitive fatigue compared to the control group (p < 0.05). There were no significant differences between genders in GIAP or fatigue for CFS/ME; however, sick women perceive cognitive effort higher than men. Deficits in sustained attention and the perception of fatigue, so effort after performing the proposed test are a sensitive and reliable indicator that allows us to substantiate a clinical suspicion and refer patients for further studies in order to confirm or rule out CFS/ME.

Investigation of Photometric Flicker Phenomenon Effect on the Perception Level of Office Workers in Different Age Groups

Today, under the conditions where the number of office workers and artificial lighting applications have increased, although the effects of the Photometric Flicker phenomenon are serious, it is an issue that has not been understood in detail and people are not aware of it. Photometric Flicker phenomenon, which is a direct result of using ballasts or drivers with low power factor and lacking the necessary filtering features; It causes results such as decreased visual performance, loss of attention and perception. Considering that the conversion of LED luminaires is still not completed in many office buildings in the country, it is seen as an important requirement to investigate the Flicker effect in interior spaces that are considered to offer similar lighting levels and conditions, and to make a concrete due diligence by correlating this with the average age of office workers. For this reason, in this study, various tests and experiments were carried out with volunteer participants aged 18-30, 31-45 and 46 years of age and older without any significant vision problems, and the outputs of these studies were aimed to shed light on the relationship between age and lighting conditions. Keywords: Photometric Flicker, Interior lighting, Age and lighting relationship, Disruptive effects in lighting

How Neuroscience-Based Research Methodologies Can Deliver New Insights to Marketers

While traditional market research methods are focused on surveys and group discussions, consumers’ attitudes, the choices they make, and the behaviour they display are all driven by a complex set of factors, and much of what is happening takes place in the subconscious mind. Learning that a stimulus engages in a positive way and that memory formation is taking place does not tell the marketer anything about the quality and impact of these memories or the engagement. With the technological advances, the emergence of neuroscience-based methodologies offers a higher degree of reliability. In the recent years, a noticeable increase in the use of eye-tracking and EEG frontal asymmetry technique was observed to measure cognitive processes of consumers among which are attention and perception to gain insights into their decision-making processes, consumer preferences and/or motivations. Using a real-world use case, this study highlights the importance of using neuroscience-based methodologies to evaluate packaging design to identify how well the brand is positioning itself on the subconscious level. While results from our study suggest that subjects displayed avoidance behaviour according to the lower frontal alpha asymmetry score, the statistical analysis failed to show significant difference between left and right hemisphere. Regardless of the statistically insignificant EEG findings, relatively longer times to first fixation among the areas on the visual suggest that the visual is not optimally designed and that for obtaining insightful data in product packaging field, relying on eye-tracking techniques is sufficient for reliable insights.

Are magicians specialists at identifying deceptive motion? The role of expertise in being fooled by sleight of hand.

The use of magic effects to investigate the blind spots in the attention and perception and roadblocks in the cognition of the spectator has yielded thought-provoking results elucidating how these techniques operate. However, little is known about the interplay between experience practising magic and being deceived by magic effects. In this study, we performed two common sleight of hand effects and their real transfer counterparts to non-magicians, and to magicians with a diverse range of experience practising magic. Although, as a group, magicians identified the sleights of hand as deceptive actions significantly more than non-magicians; this ability was only evidenced in magicians with more than 5 years in the craft. However, unlike the rest of the participants, experienced magicians had difficulty correctly pinpointing the location of the coin in one of the real transfers presented. We hypothesise that this might be due to the inherent ambiguity of this transfer, in which, contrary to the other real transfer performed, no clear perceptive clue is given about the location of the coin. We suggest that extensive time practising magic might have primed experienced magicians to anticipate foul play when observing ambiguous movements, even when the actions observed are genuine.

Are magicians specialists at identifying deceptive motion? The role of expertise in being fooled by sleight of hand.

The use of magic effects to investigate the blind spots in the attention and perception and roadblocks in the cognition of the spectator has yielded thought-provoking results elucidating how these techniques operate. However, little is known about the interplay between experience practising magic and being deceived by magic effects. In this study, we performed two common sleight of hand effects and their real transfer counterparts to non-magicians, and to magicians with a diverse range of experience practising magic. Although, as a group, magicians identified the sleights of hand as deceptive actions significantly more than non-magicians; this ability was only evidenced in magicians with more than 5 years in the craft. However, unlike the rest of the participants, experienced magicians had difficulty correctly pinpointing the location of the coin in one of the real transfers presented. We hypothesise that this might be due to the inherent ambiguity of this transfer, in which, contrary to the other real transfer performed, no clear perceptive clue is given about the location of the coin. We suggest that extensive time practising magic might have primed experienced magicians to anticipate foul play when observing ambiguous movements, even when the actions observed are genuine.

EXPRESS: Do facially disfiguring features influence attention and perception of faces? Evidence from an antisaccade task

Facial disfigurements can influence how observers attend to and interact with the person, leading to disease-avoidance behaviour and emotions (disgust, threat, fear for contagion). However, it is unclear whether this behaviour is reflected in the effect of the facial stigma on attention and perceptual encoding of facial information. We addressed this question by measuring, in a mixed antisaccade task, observers’ speed and accuracy of orienting of visual attention towards or away from peripherally presented upright and inverted unfamiliar faces that had either a realistic looking disease-signalling feature (a skin discoloration), a non-disease-signalling control feature, or no added feature. The presence of a disfiguring or control feature did not influence the orienting of attention (in terms of saccadic latency) towards upright faces, sugesting that avoidance responses towards facial stigma do not occur during covert attention. However, disfiguring and control features signficantly reduced the effect of stimulus inversion on saccadic latency, thus suggesting an impact on the holistic processing of facial information. The implications of these findings for the encoding and appraisal of of facial disfigurements are discussed.

The Importance of Visual Attention and Perception in Journalism

In this chapter, psychological theories of visual perception and attention are considered in relation to journalism. First, the chapter discusses so-called limited capacity processing—that is, humans are limited in the amount of information they can process at any one time. Next, journalists’ use of visual images is discussed. Although a picture ‘may be worth a thousand words’ (or more), journalists also need to take account of so-called ‘wishful seeing’—that people may see only what they want to see. The chapter then considers the phenomenon of ‘priming’ in relation to the way in which a story is framed, which may trigger particular concepts or stereotypes (positive or negative). Finally, the chapter considers emotional processing within journalism—how an individual’s emotional state may impact on their perceptions of a story, and how journalists may utilize emotion to influence audience engagement and comprehension.

Exploring the perceptual inabilities of Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius) using magic effects

In recent years, scientists have begun to use magic effects to investigate the blind spots in our attention and perception [G. Kuhn, Experiencing the Impossible: The Science of Magic (2019); S. Macknik, S. Martinez-Conde, S. Blakeslee, Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions (2010)]. Recently, we suggested that similar techniques could be transferred to nonhuman animal observers and that such an endeavor would provide insight into the inherent commonalities and discrepancies in attention and perception in human and nonhuman animals [E. Garcia-Pelegrin, A. K. Schnell, C. Wilkins, N. S. Clayton, Science 369, 1424–1426 (2020)]. Here, we performed three different magic effects (palming, French drop, and fast pass) to a sample of six Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius). These magic effects were specifically chosen as they utilize different cues and expectations that mislead the spectator into thinking one object has or has not been transferred from one hand to the other. Results from palming and French drop experiments suggest that Eurasian jays have different expectations from humans when observing some of these effects. Specifically, Eurasian jays were not deceived by effects that required them to expect an object to move between hands when observing human hand manipulations. However, similar to humans, Eurasian jays were misled by magic effects that utilize fast movements as a deceptive action. This study investigates how another taxon perceives the magician’s techniques of deception that commonly deceive humans.

THe The Attentional System in The Case of Harvey Weinstein Sexual Abuse Allegations on International Online News

The study aims to find out the attention system, especially, the focus of attention patterns, on news articles related to the Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment allegations case. Qualitative descriptive methods were used in this study. The data was taken from the BBC and the stylist's broadcasting article about the case. The results show that the figure-ground organization as an element in the focus of attention patterns is mapped and clearly constructed. Weinstein, who fits the role of the perpetrator, reasoned on the victim and the attention of the news writer's article that formed the ground, while the victim and other entities set the ground in the sentence. This reasoned and background phenomenon shows that the cognition of victims and news writers places more attention and perception on perpetrators than other entities.