The Differential Impact of Mystery in Nature on Attention: An Oculometric Study

Nature exposure can provide benefits on stress, health and cognitive performance. According to Attention Restoration Theory (ART), the positive impact of nature on cognition is mainly driven by fascination. Fascinating properties of nature such as water or a winding hiking trail may capture involuntary attention, allowing the directed form of attention to rest and to recover. This claim has been supported by studies relying on eye-tracking measures of attention deployment, comparing exposure to urban and nature settings. Yet, recent studies have shown that promoting higher engagement with a nature setting can improve restorative benefits, hence challenging ART’s view that voluntary attention is resting. Besides, recent evidence published by Szolosi et al. (2014) suggests that voluntary attention may be involved during exposure to high-mystery nature images which they showed as having greater potential for attention restoration. The current study explored how exposure to nature images of different scenic qualities in mystery (and restoration potential) could impact the engagement of attention. To do so, participants were shown nature images characterized by either low or high mystery properties (with allegedly low or high restoration potential, respectively) and were asked to evaluate their fascination and aesthetic levels. Concurrently, an eye tracker collected measures of pupil size, fixations and spontaneous blinks as indices of attentional engagement. Results showed that high-mystery nature images had higher engagement than low-mystery images as supported by the larger pupil dilations, the higher number of fixations and the reduced number of blinks and durations of fixations. Taken together, these results challenge ART’s view that directed attention is merely resting during exposure to restorative nature and offer new hypotheses on potential mechanisms underlying attention restoration.

Trait Mindfulness Predicts Helping Behavior toward Racial Ingroup and Outgroup Members

A study examined whether trait mindfulness would increase spontaneous helping behavior toward racial outgroup members (vs ingroup members). Self-identifying White participants scoring higher in basic trait mindfulness more frequently helped both racial outgroup and ingroup members in two randomly assigned lab-based helping simulations: (1) giving one’s seat to a person on crutches or (2) aiding an experimenter in picking up dropped consent forms. Men were 3.70 times as likely to help than women. Discussion focuses on the role of individual differences in mindful attention deployment in helping.

A scoping review on emotion regulation mechanisms employed in the control of Dharaneeya vegas (emotions that should be restrained) in light of Modern psychology and Ayurveda

Experiencing positive emotions are now becoming one among the highest virtues. It becomes important for individuals to develop emotional intelligence competencies. There are many ways through which positive emotions can be reinforced. Modern psychology also encourages cultivation of emotional regulation capacity. This article describes modern as well as Ayurvedic mechanisms for emotional regulation to cultivate healthy emotion regulation competency. After database search from PUBMED, total 14 articles, 11 from modern psychiatry and 3 Ayurveda were reviewed and following results are obtained. There are five instances in which emotion regulation may occur: Situation Selection, Situation Modification, Attention Deployment, Cognitive Change and Response Modulation. Ayurveda observes that the main reason for mental disequilibrium is taking extreme or minimal stance in mano-arthas. Ayurveda perceive that dhee, dhriti and smrithi are tripods that helps a person regulate his inclination towards mano-arthas. Ayurveda advices certain conducts to be followed by every person irrespective of Manasa prakriti. Ayurveda insist to control certain urges and those urges are termed as dharaneeya vegas. It preached some conducts to strengthen dhee, dhrithi and smrithi and they can be collectively called sadvrittam. Sadvrittam advocates human to always engage in learning (education) all existing science, persuades a person with ultimate aim of salvation by following right conduct, incentivisation with incentives health and prosperity, coercion through fear of diseases, rebirths, bad offspring’s, training through detachment, restriction by morality, environmental restructuring by execution in community level, modelling by showing aptas and enablement by teaching it to every one irrespective of inequality.

More knowledge causes a focused attention deployment pattern leading to lower creative performances

Previous studies demonstrate that people with less professional knowledge can achieve higher performance than those with more professional knowledge in creative activities. However, the factors related to this phenomenon remain unclear. Based on previous discussions in cognitive science, we hypothesised that people with different amounts of professional knowledge have varying attention deployment patterns, leading to different creative performances. To examine our hypothesis, we analysed two datasets collected from a web-based survey and a popular online shopping website, Amazon.com (United States). We found that during information processing, people with less professional knowledge tended to give their divided attention, which positively affected creative performances. Contrarily, people with more professional knowledge tended to give their concentrated attention, which had a negative effect. Our results shed light on the relation between the amount of professional knowledge and attention deployment patterns, thereby enabling a deeper understanding of the factors underlying the different creative performances of people with varying amounts of professional knowledge.

Different computations underlie overt and covert spatial attention

Perception and action are tightly coupled: visual responses at the saccade target are enhanced right before saccade onset. This phenomenon, presaccadic attention, is a form of overt attention—deployment of visual attention with concurrent eye movements. Presaccadic attention is well-documented, but its underlying computational process remains unknown. This is in stark contrast with covert attention—deployment of visual attention without concurrent eye movements—for which the computational process is well characterized. Here, a series of psychophysical experiments reveal that presaccadic attention modulates visual performance only via response gain changes even when attention field size increases, violating the predictions of a normalization model of attention, which has been widely used to explain the computations underlying covert attention. Our empirical results and model comparisons reveal that the perceptual modulations by overt and covert spatial attention are mediated through different computations.

Expectations and perceptual priming in a visual search task: Evidence from eye movements and behavior

An extensive amount of research indicates that repeating target and distractor features facilitates pop-out search while switching these features slows the search. Following the seminal study by Maljkovic & Nakayama (1994), this ‘priming of pop-out’ effect (PoP) has been widely described as an automatic bottom-up process that is independent of the observers' expectations. At the same time, numerous studies emphasize the crucial role of expectations in visual attention deployment. Our experiment shows that in contrast to previous claims, PoP in a classic color singleton search task is a mix of automatic priming and expectations. Participants searched for a uniquely-colored diamond among two same-colored distractors. Target color sequences were either predictable (e.g., two red-target-green-distractors trials, followed by two green-target-red- distractors trials, and so on) or random. Responses were faster in predictable color sequences than randomly changing ones with equal number of repetitions of target colors on preceding trials. Analysis of observers’ eye movements showed that predictability of target color affected both latency and accuracy of the first saccade during a search trial. Our results support the idea that PoP is governed not only by automatic effects from previous target or distractor features but also by top-down expectations.