Covert attention modulates visual perception in early infancy.

In a standard Posner paradigm, participants were endogenously cued to attend to a peripheral location in visual space without making eye movements. They responded faster to target letters presented at cued than at uncued locations. On some trials, instead of a manual response, they had to move their eyes to a location in space. Results showed that the eyes deviated away from the validly cued location; when the cue was invalid and attention had to be allocated to the uncued location, eye movements also deviated away, but now from the uncued location. The extent to which the eyes deviated from cued and uncued locations was related to the dynamics of attention allocation. We hypothesized that this deviation was due to the successful inhibition of the attended location. The results imply that the oculomotor system is not only involved during the endogenous direction of covert attention to a cued location, but also when covert attention is directed to an uncued location. It appears that the oculomotor system is activated wherever spatial attention is allocated. The strength of saccade deviation might turn out to be an important measure for the amount of attention allocated to any particular location over time.

Luck et al. (2021, Progress toward resolving the attentional capture debate. Visual Cognition, 29(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/13506285.2020.1848949) propose that proactive suppression can help to resolve the long-standing attentional capture debate. They argue that salient but task-irrelevant stimuli automatically generate a priority signal, which leads to attentional capture if it is not suppressed. While this signal suppression framework provides a refreshing new perspective on attentional capture, it cannot fully resolve this debate. To do this, it would have to be demonstrated that task-contingent capture effects in spatial cueing tasks are linked to proactive feature-based suppression preventing attentional capture by salient but irrelevant objects. I argue that there is little evidence if any evidence for such a link. I consider possible reasons why suppression does not seem to play a major role in spatial cueing tasks, and also highlight important general limitations of proactive inhibitory control in visual search.

Attentional bias is the interaction that occurs between emotion and attention. Monoamine oxidase and dopamine β-hydroxylase are involved in the balances of neurotransmitters in the cortex. Much evidence has shown that those enzymes play important roles in human emotion and attention. To investigate the potential influences of some functional polymorphisms in DBH, MAOA, and MAOB on attentional bias, we performed a population-based study in a young Chinese Han group. The results indicated that -1021C/T in DBH was associated with index effect of the neutral facial expressions in spatial cueing task (F = 4.940, P = 0.007), and there was a positive correlation between the dosage of C allele and the index effect (r = 0.068, P = 0.040). Furthermore, we found significant interactions between 19-bp Ins/Del in DBH and VNTR of MAOA on attentional biases for negative expressions in spatial cueing task (F = 3.397, P = 0.009) and dot-probe task (F = 2.827, P = 0.024). The present study suggests that DBH and MAOA can influence human attentional biases, and there is a gene-gene interaction between the DBH and MAOA on attentional bias for negative expressions.

Social information rapidly prioritizes overt but not covert attention in a joint spatial cueing task

Human behavioral studies show that there is greater sensory/perceptual detail associated with true memories than false memories. We therefore hypothesized that true recognition of abstract shapes would elicit greater visual cortical activation than would false recognition. During functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), participants studied exemplar shapes and later made recognition memory decisions ("old" or "new") concerning studied exemplars (old shapes), nonstudied lures (related shapes) and new shapes. Within visual processing regions, direct contrasts between true recognition ("old" response to an old shape; old-hit) and false recognition ("old" response to a related shape; related-false alarm) revealed preferential true recognition-related activity in early visual processing regions (Brodmann area (BA)17, BA18). By comparison, both true and false recognition were associated with activity in early and late (BA19, BA37) visual processing regions, the late regions potentially supporting "old" responses, independent of accuracy. Further analyses suggested that the differential early visual processing activity reflected repetition priming, a type of implicit memory. Thus, the sensory signature that distinguishes true from false recognition may not be accessible to conscious awareness.

Very little is known about the neural structures involved in the perception of realistic dynamic facial expressions. In the present study, a unique set of naturalistic dynamic facial emotional expressions was created. Through fMRI and connectivity analysis, a dynamic face perception network was identified, which is demonstrated to extend Haxby et al.'s [Haxby, J. V., Hoffman, E. A., & Gobbini, M. I. The distributed human neural system for face perception. Trends in Cognitive Science, 4, 223-233, 2000] distributed neural system for face perception. This network includes early visual regions, such as the inferior occipital gyrus, which is identified as insensitive to motion or affect but sensitive to the visual stimulus, the STS, identified as specifically sensitive to motion, and the amygdala, recruited to process affect. Measures of effective connectivity between these regions revealed that dynamic facial stimuli were associated with specific increases in connectivity between early visual regions, such as the inferior occipital gyrus and the STS, along with coupling between the STS and the amygdala, as well as the inferior frontal gyrus. These findings support the presence of a distributed network of cortical regions that mediate the perception of different dynamic facial expressions.

Disambiguating the roles of area V1 and the lateral occipital complex (LOC) in contour integration

Facilitated attentional engagement to, and impaired disengagement from, negative stimuli are centrally involved in maladaptive psychological states, anxiety and mood disorders. Theoretical frameworks propose that yoga-based practices modulate attention to emotion via bottom-up and top-down processes which could shape attentional engagement and disengagement patterns over time, respectively, and thus promote healthier emotion processing. This study examined whether long-term yoga practice and current weekly practice load predicted reduced emotional bias in predominantly bottom-up and top-down emotional attention, as indicated by attentional engagement and disengagement performance in two emotional spatial cueing tasks. Twenty long-term yoga practitioners (gender: 60% feminine; mean age: 46.60 ± 12.37 years; mean yoga experience: 16.40 ± 13.02 years; yoga/meditation teachers: 70%) completed two emotional spatial cueing tasks, under exogenous or endogenous orienting. Engagement and disengagement biases are derived from reaction times to fearful vs. neutral facial expressions. The results indicated that only long-term yoga experience, and not current weekly hours of practice, interacted with performance in the spatial cueing tasks. Specifically, long-term yoga experience was associated with facilitated attentional disengagement from fearful faces under endogenous orienting, which represent conditions largely dependent on top-down attentional control and regulatory skills. These findings suggest that long-term regular yoga practice primarily modified top-down processes of emotion regulation in our sample. This study helps to address research gaps in the field by employing behavioral methods, uncovering mechanisms underlying long-term contemplative practices, and indicating how behavioral health interventions can shape cognitive-affective processes.

Previous studies investigated the effects of crossmodal spatial attention by comparing the responses to validly versus invalidly cued target stimuli. Dynamics of cortical rhythms in the time interval between cue and target might contribute to cue effects on performance. Here, we studied the influence of spatial attention on ongoing oscillatory brain activity in the interval between cue and target onset. In a first experiment, subjects underwent periods of tactile stimulation (cue) followed by visual stimulation (target) in a spatial cueing task as well as tactile stimulation as a control. In a second experiment, cue validity was modified to be 50%, 75%, or else 25%, to separate effects of exogenous shifts of attention caused by tactile stimuli from that of endogenous shifts. Tactile stimuli produced: 1) a stronger lateralization of the sensorimotor beta-rhythm rebound (15–22 Hz) after tactile stimuli serving as cues versus not serving as cues; 2) a suppression of the occipital alpha-rhythm (7–13 Hz) appearing only in the cueing task (this suppression was stronger contralateral to the endogenously attended side and was predictive of behavioral success); 3) an increase of prefrontal gamma-activity (25–35 Hz) specifically in the cueing task. We measured cue-related modulations of cortical rhythms which may accompany crossmodal spatial attention, expectation or decision, and therefore contribute to cue validity effects. The clearly lateralized alpha suppression after tactile cues in our data indicates its dependence on endogenous rather than exogenous shifts of visuo-spatial attention following a cue independent of its modality.

Although migraine is classified as a headache disorder, a key part of migraine pathophysiology is a heightened excitability of visual cortices in between headache events. The goal of our study was to examine the behavioral impact of this visuocortical hyperexcitability, in terms of its effect on reflexive visual attentional orienting. In Experiment 1, using a non-predictive spatial cuing task that relied on sensory-evoked responses in the visual cortex for triggering attentional orienting, we found that migraineurs had greater attentional enhancement of manual target responses, relative to non-migraine controls. In two control experiments we confirmed that this heightened attention effect in migraineurs is not due to exaggerated reflexive orienting responses in general, but rather, it appears to be specifically associated with sensory-evoked attentional triggers. Taken together, this confirms that the functional consequences of hyperexcitable visual cortex in migraineurs are not just purely sensory in nature, but directly impact at least some forms of reflexive attention. This provides evidence of at least one cognitive implication of hyperexcitable visual cortical responses in migraineurs, namely heightened reflexive visual-spatial orienting specific to sudden-onset peripheral events.

The purpose of this study was to determine if the ability to set attention is different between athletes and nonathletes. University volleyball players were compared with nonathletes on a spatial cuing task similar to that of C. L. Folk, R. W. Remington, and J. C. Johnston (1992). As expected, both groups showed evidence of entering into a specific attentional set because attentional cuing effects were found only when cues and targets shared a task-relevant feature (onset or color). In addition, the cuing effects when the cues matched the targets were greater for the athletes than for the nonathletes. The results are discussed in terms of the orienting of attention and athletic performance.

The effects of aging on alerting, orienting, and executive function were examined with the use of the Attention Network Task, which combines the Posner spatial cuing task and the Eriksen flanker task into a single procedure. We found that older adults showed significantly less alerting than young adults in response to a warning cue, although there were no age differences in orienting or executive function once processing speed was taken into account. We suggest that age differences in alerting may depend in part upon the presentation duration or persistence of the warning cue.

Multivariate pattern analysis of the neural correlates of smoking cue attentional bias

C-03 遮蔽された物体上での視覚的注意の広がり : 空間的手がかり課題による検討

Recent imaging and clinical studies have challenged the concept that the functional role of the cerebellum is exclusively in the motor domain. We present evidence of slowed covert orienting of visuospatial attention in patients with developmental cerebellar abnormality (patients with autism, a disorder in which at least 90% of all postmortem cases reported to date have Purkinje neuron loss), and in patients with cerebellar damage acquired from tumor or stroke. In spatial cuing tasks, normal control subjects across a wide age range were able to orient attention within 100 msec of an attention-directing cue. Patients with cerebellar damage showed little evidence of having oriented attention after 100 msec but did show the effects of attention orienting after 800-1200 msec. These effects were demonstrated in a task in which results were independent of the motor response. In this task, smaller cerebellar vermal lobules VI-VII (from magnetic resonance imaging) were associated with greater attention-orienting deficits. Although eye movements may also be disrupted in patients with cerebellar damage, abnormal gaze shifting cannot explain the timing and nature of the attention-orienting deficits reported here. These data may be consistent with evidence from animal models that suggest damage to the cerebellum disrupts both the spatial encoding of a location for an attentional shift and the subsequent gaze shift. These data are also consistent with a model of cerebellar function in which the cerebellum supports a broad spectrum of brain systems involved in both nonmotor and motor function.