Search results for "attention"
showing 10 items of 934 documents
Sleepiness, sleep, and use of sleepiness countermeasures in shift-working long-haul truck drivers
2015
Driver sleepiness is a prevalent phenomenon among professional drivers working unconventional and irregular hours. For compromising occupational and traffic safety, sleepiness has become one of the major conundrums of road transportation. To further elucidate the phenomenon, an on-road study canvassing the under-explored relationship between working hours and sleepiness, sleep, and use of sleepiness countermeasures during and outside statutory rest breaks was conducted. Testing the association between the outcomes and working hours, generalized estimating equations models were fitted on a data collected from 54 long-haul truck drivers (mean 38.1 ± 10.5 years, one female) volunteering in the…
Are different kinds of acoustic features processed differently for speech and non-speech sounds?
2001
This study examined how changes in different types of acoustic features are processed in the brain for both speech and non-speech sounds. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in native Finnish speakers presented with sequences of repetitive vowels (/e/) or complex harmonical tones interspersed with infrequent changes in duration, frequency and either a vowel change (/o/ for vowel sequences) or a double deviant (frequency+duration change for tone sequences). The stimuli were presented monaurally in separate blocks to either the left or right ear. The results showed that speech stimuli were more efficiently processed than harmonical tones as reflected by an enhanced mismatch negativi…
Regular rhythmic primes boost P600 in grammatical error processing in dyslexic adults and matched controls
2020
International audience; Regular musical rhythms orient attention over time and facilitate processing. Previous research has shown that regular rhythmic stimulation benefits subsequent syntax processing in children with dyslexia and specific language impairment. The present EEG study examined the influence of a rhythmic musical prime on the P600 late evoked-potential, associated with grammatical error detection for dyslexic adults and matched controls. Participants listened to regular or irregular rhythmic prime sequences followed by grammatically correct and incorrect sentences. They were required to perform grammaticality judgments for each auditorily presented sentence while EEG was recor…
To switch or not to switch: Brain potential indices of attentional control after task-relevant and task-irrelevant changes of stimulus features
2009
Attention is controlled by the interplay of sensory input and top-down processes. We compared attentional control processes during task switching and reorientation after distraction. The primary task was to discriminate laterally and centrally presented tones; these stimuli were composed of a frequent standard or an infrequent deviant pitch. In the distraction condition, pitch was irrelevant and could be ignored. In the switch condition, pitch changes were relevant: whenever a deviant tone was presented, participants had to discriminate its pitch and not its direction. The task in standard trials remained unchanged. In both conditions, deviants elicited mismatch negativity (MMN), P3a, P3b, …
Frontal subregions mediating Elevator Counting task performance.
2010
Deficits in sustained attention may lead to action slips in everyday life as irrelevant action sequences are inappropriately triggered internally or by the environment. While deficits in sustained attention have been associated with damage to the frontal lobes of the brain, little is known about the role of the frontal lobes in the Elevator Counting subtest of the Test of Everyday Attention. In the current study, 55 frontal patients subdivided into medial, orbital and lateral subgroups, 18 patients with posterior lesions and 82 healthy controls performed the Elevator Counting task. The results revealed that patients with medial and left lateral prefrontal lesions were significantly impaired…
Automatic processing of rare versus novel auditory stimuli reveal different mechanisms of auditory change detection
2012
Automatic detection of rare stimuli or changes in an auditory stimulation can distract ongoing task processing by attracting attention away from task relevant information. Typically, the effectiveness of auditory change detection is tested by rare and unpredictable deviations (compared with an otherwise regular auditory presentation) or by rare environmental sounds. The present study demonstrates that both types of stimuli are capable of triggering automatic orientation of attention and that rare environmental sounds are more effective than deviations in distraction of attention. This finding suggests different mechanisms underlying the detection of auditory change. Moreover, novelty as con…
Cognitive functioning and anhedonia in subjects at risk for schizophrenia
1993
This study investigated the performance of individuals with familiar loading of schizophrenia (healthy siblings of schizophrenic inpatients) on three neuropsychological tasks assumed to require frontal lobe functions: Trail Making Test (TMT), verbal fluency and Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). Healthy siblings of schizophrenics differed in performance from healthy controls not only on the WCST, but also on the Trail Making Test and the verbal fluency task. Furthermore, scores of physical anhedonia, assessed in a self-report rating scale (Chapman et al., 1976) were also significantly higher in the high risk group than in the control sample. However, healthy siblings of schizophrenics did …
Comparative neurocognitive effects of lithium and anticonvulsants in long-term stable bipolar patients
2015
Background: The aim of choosing a mood-stabilizing drug (lithium or anticonvulsants) or a combination of them with minimal neurocognitive effects is to stimulate the development of criteria for a therapeutic adequacy, particularly in Bipolar Disorder (BD) patients who are clinically stabilized. Method: Three groups of BD patients were established according to their treatment: (i) lithium monotherapy (n=29); (ii) lithium together with one or more anticonvulsants (n=28); and (iii) one or more anticonvulsants (n=16). A group of healthy controls served as the control (n=25). The following tests were applied: Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, Trail Making Test, Wechsler Memory Scale, Rey Comple…
Attentional Focus and Grip Width Influences on Bench Press Resistance Training.
2018
This study evaluated the influence of different attentional foci for varied grip widths in the bench press. Eighteen resistance-trained men were familiarized with the procedure and performed a one-repetition maximum (1RM) test during Session 1. In Session 2, they used three different standardized grip widths (100%, 150%, and 200% of biacromial width distance) in random order at 50% of 1RM while also engaged in three different attention focus conditions (external focus on the bench press, internal focus on pectoralis major muscles, and internal focus on triceps brachii muscles). Surface electromyography (EMG) signals were recorded from the triceps brachii and pectoralis major, and peak EMG …
Inter-hemispheric remapping between arm proprioception and vision of the hand is disrupted by single pulse TMS on the left parietal cortex.
2013
International audience; Parietal cortical areas are involved in sensori-motor transformations for their respective contralateral hemifield/body. When arms of the subjects are crossed while their gaze is fixed straight ahead, vision of the hand is processed by the hemisphere ipsilateral to the arm position and proprioception of the arm by the contralateral hemisphere. It induces interhemispheric transfer and remapping. Our objective was to investigate whether a single pulse TMS applied to the left parietal cortical area would disturb interhemispheric remapping in a similar case, and would increase a simple reaction time (RT) with respect to a control single pulse TMS applied to the frontal c…