Rapid detection of social interactions is the result of domain general attentional processes

Using visual search displays of interacting and non-interacting pairs, it has been demonstrated that detection of social interactions is facilitated. For example, two people facing each other are found faster than two people with their backs turned: an effect that may reflect social binding. However, recent work has shown the same effects with non-social arrow stimuli, where towards facing arrows are detected faster than away facing arrows. This latter work suggests a primary mechanism is an attention orienting process driven by basic low-level direction cues. However, evidence for lower level attentional processes does not preclude a potential additional role of higher-level social processes. Therefore, in this series of experiments we test this idea further by directly comparing basic visual features that orient attention with representations of socially interacting individuals. Results confirm the potency of orienting of attention via low-level visual features in the detection of interacting objects. In contrast, there is little evidence for the representation of social interactions influencing initial search performance.

Disrupted Spatial Organization of Cued Exogenous Attention Persists Into Adulthood in Developmental Dyslexia

Purpose: Abnormal exogenous attention orienting and diffused spatial distribution of attention have been associated with reading impairment in children with developmental dyslexia. However, studies in adults have failed to replicate such relationships. The goal of the present study was to address this issue by assessing exogenous visual attention and its peripheral spatial distribution in adults with developmental dyslexia.Methods: We measured response times, accuracy and eye movements of 18 dyslexics and 19 typical readers in a cued discrimination paradigm, in which stimuli were presented at different peripheral eccentricities.Results: Results showed that adults with developmental dyslexia were slower that controls in using their mechanisms of exogenous attention orienting. Moreover, we found that while controls became slower with the increase of eccentricity, dyslexics showed an abnormal inflection at 10° as well as similar response times at the most distant eccentricities. Finally, dyslexics show attentional facilitation deficits above 12° of eccentricity, suggesting an attentional engagement deficit at far periphery.Conclusion: Taken together, our findings indicate that, in dyslexia, the temporal deficits in orientation of attention and its abnormal peripheral spatial distribution are not restricted to childhood and persist into adulthood. Our results are, therefore, consistent with the hypothesis that the neural network underlying selective spatial attention is disrupted in dyslexia.

Orienting Auditory Attention through Vision: the Impact of Monaural Listening

The understanding of linguistic messages can be made extremely complex by the simultaneous presence of interfering sounds, especially when they are also linguistic in nature. In two experiments, we tested if visual cues directing attention to spatial or temporal components of speech in noise can improve its identification. The hearing-in-noise task required identification of a five-digit sequence (target) embedded in a stream of time-reversed speech. Using a custom-built device located in front of the participant, we delivered visual cues to orient attention to the location of target sounds and/or their temporal window. In Exp. 1 (), we validated this visual-to-auditory cueing method in normal-hearing listeners, tested under typical binaural listening conditions. In Exp. 2 (), we assessed the efficacy of the same visual cues in normal-hearing listeners wearing a monaural ear plug, to study the effects of simulated monaural and conductive hearing loss on visual-to-auditory attention orienting. While Exp. 1 revealed a benefit of both spatial and temporal visual cues for hearing in noise, Exp. 2 showed that only the temporal visual cues remained effective during monaural listening. These findings indicate that when the acoustic experience is altered, visual-to-auditory attention orienting is more robust for temporal compared to spatial attributes of the auditory stimuli. These findings have implications for the relation between spatial and temporal attributes of sound objects, and when planning devices to orient audiovisual attention for subjects suffering from hearing loss.

Revisiting Persistent Neuronal Activity During Covert Spatial Attention

Persistent activity has been observed in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), in particular during the delay periods of visual attention tasks. Classical approaches based on the average activity over multiple trials have revealed that such an activity encodes the information about the attentional instruction provided in such tasks. However, single-trial approaches have shown that activity in this area is rather sparse than persistent and highly heterogeneous not only within the trials but also between the different trials. Thus, this observation raised the question of how persistent the actually persistent attention-related prefrontal activity is and how it contributes to spatial attention. In this paper, we review recent evidence of precisely deconstructing the persistence of the neural activity in the PFC in the context of attention orienting. The inclusion of machine-learning methods for decoding the information reveals that attention orienting is a highly dynamic process, possessing intrinsic oscillatory dynamics working at multiple timescales spanning from milliseconds to minutes. Dimensionality reduction methods further show that this persistent activity dynamically incorporates multiple sources of information. This novel framework reflects a high complexity in the neural representation of the attention-related information in the PFC, and how its computational organization predicts behavior.

Expectancy to Eat Modulates Cognitive Control and Attention Toward Irrelevant Food and Non-food Images in Healthy Starving Individuals. A Behavioral Study

It is thought that just as hunger itself, the expectancy to eat impacts attention and cognitive control toward food stimuli, but this theory has not been extensively explored at a behavioral level. In order to study the effect of expectancy to eat on attentional and cognitive control mechanisms, 63 healthy fasting participants were presented with an affective priming spatial compatibility Simon task that included both food and object (non-food) distracters. The participants (N = 63) were randomly assigned to two groups: an “immediate expectancy” group made up of participants who expected to eat immediately after the task (N = 31; females = 21; age = 26.8 ± 9.6) and a “delayed expectancy” cohort made up of individuals who expected to eat a few hours later (N = 32; females = 21; age = 25.0 ± 8.0). Slower reaction times (RTs) toward the food and non-food distracters and a more pronounced effect on the RTs in the incompatible condition [i.e., the Simon effect (SE)] were noted in both groups. The effect of the food and non-food distracters on the RTs was more pronounced in the immediate with respect to the delayed expectancy group. The magnitude of the SE for the food and the non-food distracters was also greater in the immediate with respect to the delayed expectancy group. These results seem to indicate that when the expectancy to eat is short, the RTs are delayed, and the SE is more pronounced when food and non-food distracters are presented. Instead, when the expectancy to eat is more distant, the distracters have less of an effect on the RTs and the correspondence effect is smaller. Our results suggest that the expectancy to eat can modulate both attention orienting and cognitive control mechanisms in healthy fasting individuals when distracting details are competing with information processing during goal directed behavior.

Asymmetric practices of reading and writing shape visuospatial attention and discrimination

Movement is generally conceived of as unfolding laterally in the writing direction that one is socialized into. In ‘Western’ languages, this is a left-to-right bias contributing to an imbalance in how attention is distributed across space. We propose that the rightward attentional bias exercises an additional unidirectional influence on discrimination performance thus shaping the congruency effect typically observed in Posner-inspired cueing tasks. In two studies, we test whether faces averted laterally serve as attention orienting cues and generate differences in both target discrimination latencies and gaze movements across left and right hemifields. Results systematically show that right-facing faces (i.e. aligned with the script direction) give rise to an advantage for cue-target pairs pertaining to the right (versus left) side of space. We report an asymmetry between congruent conditions in the form of right-sided facilitation for: (a) response time in discrimination decisions (experiment 1–2) and (b) eye-gaze movements, namely earlier onset to first fixation in the respective region of interest (experiment 2). Left and front facing cues generated virtually equal exploration patterns, confirming that the latter did not prime any directionality. These findings demonstrate that visuospatial attention and consequent discrimination are highly dependent on the asymmetric practices of reading and writing.