Midfrontal theta oscillation encodes haptic delay

Haptic technologies aim to simulate tactile or kinesthetic interactions with a physical or virtual environment in order to enhance user experience and/or performance. However, due to stringent communication and computational needs, the user experience is influenced by delayed haptic feedback. While delayed feedback is well understood in the visual and auditory modalities, little research has systematically examined the neural correlates associated with delayed haptic feedback. In this paper, we used electroencephalography (EEG) to study sensory and cognitive neural correlates caused by haptic delay during passive and active tasks performed using a haptic device and a computer screen. Results revealed that theta power oscillation was significantly higher at the midfrontal cortex under the presence of haptic delay. Sensory correlates represented by beta rebound were found to be similar in the passive task and different in the active task under the delayed and synchronous conditions. Additionally, the event related potential (ERP) P200 component is modulated under the haptic delay condition during the passive task. The P200 amplitude significantly reduced in the last 20% of trials during the passive task and in the absence of haptic delay. Results suggest that haptic delay could be associated with increased cognitive control processes including multi-sensory divided attention followed by conflict detection and resolution with an earlier detection during the active task. Additionally, haptic delay tends to generate greater perceptual attention that does not significantly decay across trials during the passive task.

The Disappearance of poetry and

Critics in the early 1990s noted a diminishing of ballet’s aesthetics in a number of choreographer William Forsythe’s works. This chapter approaches the apparent disappearance of the poetic by comparing three terms used to describe energetic qualities of performance. Tracking from the “attack” associated with bravura or impassioned performance to neoclassicism’s insouciant “sprezzatura” and finally to contemporary and queer aesthetics of “fierceness,” it shows how contemporary ballet has come to reveal not only the energy and effort regulated or hidden in earlier styles but also the intense embodied experience of balletic practice. It then turns to Forsythe’s later choreographic and staging methods to describe how the ensemble’s continuing exploration of balletic principles shifted focus from the form’s external visual manifestation to the heightened perceptual attention and deep corporeal sensing inherent in the experience of dancing. In the process, Forsythe’s later choreographic research acknowledges and ratifies the skill, power, pleasure, and joy that balletic practice makes possible and that contemporary ballet more overtly displays.

Aristotle on Attention

I argue that a study of the Nicomachean Ethics and of the Parva Naturalia shows that Aristotle had a notion of attention. This notion captures the common aspects of apparently different phenomena like perceiving something vividly, being distracted by a loud sound or by a musical piece, focusing on a geometrical problem. For Aristotle, these phenomena involve a specific selectivity that is the outcome of the competition between different cognitive stimuli. This selectivity is attention. I argue that Aristotle studied the common aspects of the physiological processes at the basis of attention and its connection with pleasure. His notion can explain perceptual attention and intellectual attention as voluntary or involuntary phenomena. In addition, it sheds light on how attention and enjoyment can enhance our cognitive activities.

Probability manipulations can modulate but not reverse reflective inhibition-of-return effects

Inhibition of return (IOR) is a phenomenon of perceptual attention characterized by delayed shifts in attention toward previously cued target locations. In reflective (internally directed) attention studies, response times (RTs) to cued items are sometimes facilitated, but other times IOR-like effects are observed wherein RTs to probed items are slower when the items had been mentally attended (refreshed) earlier in the trial. Perceptual IOR is known to be modulated by the probability that target and cued locations match. If the same is true for reflective attention, it could account for why sometimes reflective attention can lead to facilitation and other times inhibition. In the current study, four experiments examined the potential facilitative or inhibitory influence of probe predictability in reflective attention. We first replicated the design and IOR like pattern of results originally reported by Johnson et al. (2013). In subsequent experiments, when the proportion of unrefreshed probes was increased, the IOR-like effect increased in magnitude. When the proportion of refreshed probes was increased, the IOR-like effect was eliminated, but there was no evidence for facilitation. Altogether, these results are consistent with perceptual IOR literature implicating underlying inhibitory and facilitative attentional processes that can either interact synergistically or nullify each other. Further work will be needed to fully understand the paradoxical effects of why reflective attention is sometimes inhibitory and other times facilitative, but the current results demonstrate that expectation can play a significant role in the size of the effect.

Mnemonic Attention in Analogy to Perceptual Attention: Harmony but Not Uniformity

It is widely accepted that peripheral cues in perception capture attention automatically, while central cues need voluntary control to exert functions. However, whether they differ similarly in working memory remains unclear. The present study addressed this issue through 5 experiments using a retro-cue paradigm with more than two hundred participants. Similar to perceptual attention, we found peripheral cues in working memory (1) were more effective than central cues in low memory-load conditions (Experiments 1 and 2), and (2) they influenced performance much faster than central cues (Experiment 5). Unlike perceptual attention, peripheral cues in working memory (1) did not capture attention to memory representations when they are uninformative (Experiment 3), and (2) could raise confidence ratings (Experiment 4). Taken together, our findings suggest that the effects of spatial cues on memory versus perception are similar but not the same.

Stimulus-induced Alpha Suppression Tracks the Difficulty of Attentional Selection, Not Visual Working Memory Storage

Human alpha-band activity (8–12 Hz) has been proposed to index a variety of mechanisms during visual processing. Here, we distinguished between an account in which alpha suppression indexes selective attention versus an account in which it indexes subsequent working memory storage. We manipulated two aspects of the visual stimuli that perceptual attention is believed to mitigate before working memory storage: the potential interference from distractors and the size of the focus of attention. We found that the magnitude of alpha-band suppression tracked both of these aspects of the visual arrays. Thus, alpha-band activity after stimulus onset is clearly related to how the visual system deploys perceptual attention and appears to be distinct from mechanisms that store target representations in working memory.