Utility Presentation in Destination Decision System

Atypical visual selective attention in children with dyslexia: evidence from N2pc and PD.

BACKGROUND:Cerebral ischemia or stroke is the second leading cause of death in the world, and most surviving patients suffer from long-term physical and cognitive disabilities, which create many social and economic problems for them and society. Visual attention impairment is a common cognitive complication among patients with cerebral ischemia, especially in the Middle Cerebral Artery (MCA). One way to improve attention in these patients is cognitive rehabilitation. RehaCom software is one of the computer-based tools to rehabilitate visual attention in these patients. The purpose of this study was to evaluate RehaCom cognitive rehabilitation on different aspects of visual attention in patients with middle cerebral artery ischemia.METHODS:In this single-blind randomized clinical trial, 30 patients with cerebral ischemia in MCA territories were selected and randomly divided into control (n=15) and intervention (n=15) groups. Visual attention of both groups was assessed before the treatments using the Integrated Visual-Auditory test (IVA). Then the intervention group was rehabilitated for 8 sessions of 45 minutes each with RehaCom cognitive software, according to our selected modules, while the control group was only under intervention by non-targeted computer games. After applying the treatments, visual attention in the two groups was assessed using the IVA test.RESULTS:There were no significant differences in visual focus attention between the intervention and control groups before the intervention (29.20±30.06 and 49.53±29.69, P value >0.05). In addition, there were no significant differences in visual selective attention in both groups before the study (23.07±24.73, 39.27±27.08, P value >0.05). However, significant differences were found in visual sustained attention, visual alternating attention, and visual divided attention at baseline (P value <0.05). After the intervention, visual focus attention in the intervention group was significantly higher than in the control group (84.67±26.51, 57.20±31.44, P value <0.05). RehaCom cognitive software intervention increased visual divided attention in the intervention group (88.40±14.85 versus 72.70±25.73, P value <0.05).CONCLUSION:These results demonstrate that using RehaCom cognitive software can improve focus attention and visual attention in the intervention group. Cognitive rehabilitation with RehaCom was able to improve visual attention deficits in patients with middle cerebral artery ischemia.

BackgroundWalking requires a high attentional cost for balance control and interferes with the control of attention. However, it is unclear whether the performance of visual spatial attention control, which is one of the functions of attention control, is also decreased during walking. In addition, although previous studies have shown right-hemispheric dominance and lower ability of left side visual spatial attention control during sitting, it remains unknown whether walking accentuates bilateral differences in visual spatial attention control. We tested the hypothesis that walking interferes with visual spatial attention control on both sides and accentuates its bilateral differences.MethodsTwenty healthy right-handed subjects (24.3 ± 2.0 years) participated in this study. Subjects performed a random stimulus–response compatibility (SRC) task during both sitting and walking situations. To evaluate the effects of walking, reaction time was measured on both sides for the two situations. In comparison to the both situations (sitting and walking), the amount of change of the SRC effect on both sides was used. In the comparing the bilateral difference (left and right), the difference of the SRC effect was evaluated in each situation. The paired t-test was applied to both comparisons for statistical analysis.ResultsThe SRC effect on both sides during walking was significantly larger than during sitting (P < 0.05). In addition, walking significantly accentuated the bilateral differences in visual spatial attention control (P < 0.05).ConclusionsThese results suggest that walking affects the performance of visual spatial attention control on both sides and accentuates its bilateral differences. These results have implications for development of practice methods of gait disorder with higher brain dysfunction.

The main question motivating this study was to which extent overt visual selective attention depends on personality traits and on whether the participant is performing a linguistic or non-linguistic task. To answer this question, this study investigated the effects of personality traits and task demands (i.e., categorising and naming pictures) on visual selective attention. The visual selective attention of 64 Dutch participants was assessed using eye-tracking. Their personality traits were measured using the Big-Five model (BFI-2-S). The results indicated that higher degrees of extraversion, open-mindedness and agreeableness affect visual selective attention during language production tasks. That is, more extraverted, more open-minded and more agreeable people could be more distracted by their partners’ pictures more than conscientious as well as emotionally negative people could be. Those who have more degrees of the latter personality traits selectively attend to their own pictures and overlook their partners’. Thus, this study contributed to the considerable number of studies investigating the effect of individual differences on cognitive processing demonstrating that some personality traits could affect selective visual attention in picture naming/categorising tasks.

A more babyfaced individual is perceived as more child-like and this impression from babyface, as known as babyface effect, has an impact on social life among various age groups. In this study, the influence of babyfaces on visual selective attention was tested by cognitive task, demonstrating that the female babyface and male mature face would draw participants’ attention so that they take their eyes off more slowly. In Experiment 1, a detection task was applied to test the influence of babyfaces on visual selective attention. In this experiment, a babyface and a mature face with the same gender were presented simultaneously with a letter on one of them. The reaction time was shorter when the target letter was overlaid with a female babyface or male mature face, suggesting an attention capture effect. To explore how this competition influenced by attentional resources, we conducted Experiment 2 with a spatial cueing paradigm and controlled the attentional resources by cueing validity and inter-stimulus interval. In this task, the female babyface and male mature face prolonged responses to the spatially separated targets under the condition of an invalid and long interval pre-cue. This observation replicated the result of Experiment 1. This indicates that the female babyface and male mature face glued visual selective attention once attentional resources were directed to them. To further investigate the subliminal influence from a babyface, we used continuous flash suppression paradigm in Experiment 3. The results, again, showed the advantage of the female babyfaces and male mature faces: they broke the suppression faster than other faces. Our results provide primary evidence that the female babyfaces and male mature faces can reliably glue the visual selective attention, both supra- and sub-liminally.

A growing body of research shows that video games may be used to enhance cognitive skills, with particular reference to attentional abilities. This research study explored the effects of video game playing on visual selective attention in a young adult sample. A secondary research objective explored the possibility that gender acted as a moderating variable with regard to their visual selective attention. This was achieved by means of a quantitative research design, which consisted of a survey research and a quasi-experimental research design. Participants were sampled using purposive sampling ( n = 80), and to test the effects of video game playing and gender on visual selective attention, participants were exposed to a computerised version of the Stroop task. Data were analysed using a two-way between-group analysis of variance (ANOVA) and results indicated a statistically significant difference in visual selective attention abilities between video game players and the non-players. Video gamers thus exhibited more advanced attentional skills than non-players. There were no interaction effects between video game playing and gender, and gender did not have a statistically significant main effect on participants’ visual selective attention.

Touch screen technology has become pervasive in the consumer product arena over the last decade. It offers some distinct advantages over traditional interfaces, including the removal of space consuming peripherals such as mice, keyboards, and joysticks from a system's design. However, there are significant drawbacks to these devices that have limited their adoption by so-called power users. Most notably, touch screens demand the user's visual attention and require them to look at the input device to avoid pressing the wrong button. Based on these observations we propose a simple system that augments an existing touch screen device to provide the user with negative feedback for touch interfaces (NFTI). This is accomplished by vibrotactile feedback that is triggered when an inactive part of the screen is accidentally touched. The goal is to simulate a touch-typing experience that could traditionally be found on a hard keyboard interface, while simultaneously retaining many of the benefits of touch screen technology. The primary contribution of this paper is to present the results of a usability study, which considers a benchmark task of tele-operation that demands the user's visual attention. We found that in nearly all cases, performance improved with NFTI. Perhaps more importantly, the addition of negative feedback did not adversely impact the user's workload. In fact, according to the exit survey, nearly 90% users prefer NFTI over conventional touch screen devices.

Visual attention is one of the most important issues for a vision guided mobile robot. Methods have been proposed for visual attention control based on information criterion. However, the robot had to stop walking for observation and decision. This paper presents a method which enables observation and decision more efficiently and adaptively while it is walking. The method uses the expected information gain from future observations for attention control and action decision. It also proposes an image compensation method to handle the image changes due to the robot motion. Both are used to estimate observation probabilities from the observation while it is walking and then action probabilities are estimated from a decision tree based on the information criterion. The method is applied to a four legged robot. Discussions on the visual attention control in the method and the future issues are given.

A left visual field (LVF) bias in perceptual judgments, response speed, and discrimination accuracy has been reported in humans. Cognitive factors, such as visual spatial attention, are known to modulate or even eliminate this bias. We investigated this problem by recording pupillometry together with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a cued visual spatial attention task. We observed that (i) the pupil was significantly more dilated following attend-right than attend-left cues, (ii) the task performance (e.g. reaction time [RT]) did not differ between attend-left and attend-right trials, and (iii) the difference in cue-related pupil dilation between attend-left and attend-right trials was inversely related to the corresponding difference in RT. Neuroscientically, correlating the difference in cue-related pupil dilation with the corresponding cue-related fMRI difference yielded activations primarily in the right hemisphere, including the right intraparietal sulcus and the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. These results suggest that (i) there is an asymmetry in visual spatial attention control, with the rightward attention control being more effortful than the leftward attention control, (ii) this asymmetry underlies the reduction or the elimination of the LVF bias, and (iii) the components of the attentional control networks in the right hemisphere are likely part of the neural substrate of the observed asymmetry in attentional control.

The auditory efferent system comprises descending projections from the cerebral cortex to subcortical nuclei, reaching the cochlear receptor through olivocochlear fibres. One of the functions attributed to this corticofugal system is to suppress irrelevant sounds during selective attention to visual stimuli. Medial olivocochlear neurons can also be activated by sounds through a brainstem reflex circuit. Whether the individual variability of this reflex is related to the cognitive capacity to suppress auditory stimuli is still controversial. Here we propose that the individual strength per animal of the olivocochlear reflex is correlated with the ability to suppress auditory distractors during visual attention in awake chinchillas. The olivocochlear reflex was elicited with a contralateral broad-band noise at ~ 60 dB and ipsilateral distortion product otoacoustic emissions were obtained at different frequencies (1–8 kHz). Fourteen chinchillas were evaluated in a behavioural protocol of visual attention with broad-band noise and chinchilla vocalizations as auditory distractors. Results show that the behavioural performance was affected by both distractors and that the magnitudes of the olivocochlear reflex evaluated at multiple frequencies were relevant for behavioural performance during visual discrimination with auditory distractors. These results stress the ecological relevance of the olivocochlear system for suppressing natural distractors.

Treatment Effects of Methylphenidate on Cognitive Functioning in Children With Mental Retardation and ADHD

Visual attention is one of the most important issues for a vision guided mobile robot not simply because visual information brings a huge amount of data but also because the visual field is limited, therefore gaze control is necessary. The paper proposes a method of sensor space segmentation for visual attention control that enables mobile robots to realize efficient observation. The efficiency is considered from a viewpoint of not geometrical reconstruction but unique action selection based on information criterion regardless of localization uncertainty. The method builds a decision tree based on the information criterion while taking the time needed for observation into account, and attention control is done by following the tree. The tree is rebuilt by introducing contextual information for more efficient attention control. The method is applied to a four legged robot that tries to shoot a ball into the goal. Discussion on the visual attention control in the method is given and the future issues are shown.

Neural evidence reveals the rapid effects of reward history on selective attention

Cognitive models and empirical studies of problem solving in visuo-spatial and causal domains suggest that problem solving tasks in such domains invoke cognitive processes involving mental animation and imagery. If these internal processes are externally manifested in the form of eye movements, such tasks present situations in which the trajectory of a user's visual attention can provide clues regarding his or her information needs to an Attentive User Interface [Vertegaal 2002]. In this paper, we briefly review research related to problem solving that involves mental imagery, and describe an experiment that looked for evidence and effects of an imagery strategy in problem solving. We eye-tracked 90 subjects solving two causal reasoning problems, one in which a diagram of the problem appeared on the stimulus display, and a second related problem that was posed on a blank display. Results indicated that 42% of the subjects employed mental imagery and visually scanned the display in a correspondingly systematic fashion. This suggests that information displays that respond to a user's visual attention trajectory, a kind of Attentive User Interface, are more likely to benefit this class of users.

The right intraparietal sulcus (rIPS) is a key region for the endogenous control of selective visual attention in the human brain. Previous studies suggest that the rIPS is especially involved in top-down control and spatial distribution of attention across both visual hemifields. We further explored these attentional functions using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) of the rIPS to modulate behavioral performance in a partial report task. Performance was analyzed according to the theory of visual attention (TVA) (Bundesen, 1990), which provides a computational framework to investigate different parameters of visuo-attentional processing such as top-down control, attentional weighting, capacity of visual short term memory, and processing speed. We investigated the effects of different tDCS current strengths (1 mA and 2 mA) in two experiments: 1 mA tDCS (anodal, cathodal, sham) did not affect any of the TVA parameters, but cathodal 2 mA stimulation significantly enhanced top-down control as evidenced by a reduction of the α parameter of TVA, regardless of hemifield. This differential impact on the top-down control component of attentional processing suggests that the horizontal rIPS is mainly involved in attentional selection as none of the spatial or resource variables of TVA were altered. Furthermore, the data add evidence to previous work highlighting (1) the importance of using appropriate current strength in stimulation protocols, and (2) that the often reported inhibitory effect of cathodal stimulation in e.g., motor tasks might not extend to cognitive paradigms.