Search results for "attention"
showing 10 items of 934 documents
Emotional interference and attentional processing in premenstrual syndrome
2017
Abstract Background and objectives Premenstrual syndrome (PMS) is characterized by menstrual cycle-related affective, behavioral, and/or somatic symptoms. By applying the emotional Stroop task (EST) the current study examined if changes in processing emotional information, which have been demonstrated in affective disorders, are also present in PMS. Methods Via online screening, telephone interviews, and daily records over two months 55 women for the PMS group (on the basis of the specific inclusion criteria and a prospectively confirmed PMS) and 55 ‘non-PMS’ controls were recruited. All participants completed three emotional Stroop tasks (EST) with neutral and negative word, picture, and f…
Entropy of balance--some recent results.
2010
Abstract Background Entropy when applied to biological signals is expected to reflect the state of the biological system. However the physiological interpretation of the entropy is not always straightforward. When should high entropy be interpreted as a healthy sign, and when as marker of deteriorating health? We address this question for the particular case of human standing balance and the Center of Pressure data. Methods We have measured and analyzed balance data of 136 participants (young, n = 45; elderly, n = 91) comprising in all 1085 trials, and calculated the Sample Entropy (SampEn) for medio-lateral (M/L) and anterior-posterior (A/P) Center of Pressure (COP) together with the Hurst…
An Autistic Endophenotype and Testosterone Are Involved in an Atypical Decline in Selective Attention and Visuospatial Processing in Middle-Aged Women
2015
Mothers of offspring with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) could present mild forms of their children’s cognitive characteristics, resulting from prenatal brain exposure and sensitivity to testosterone (T). Indeed, their cognition is frequently characterized by hyper-systemizing, outperforming in tests that assess cognitive domains such as selective attention, and fine motor and visuospatial skills. In the general population, all these start to decline around the mid-forties. This study aimed to characterize whether middle-aged women who are biological mothers of individuals with ASD had better performance in the aforementioned cognitive skills than mothers of normative children (in both gro…
Neurochemical alterations in women with borderline personality disorder and comorbid attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder
2010
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is associated with structural and functional brain changes. Recent models and findings refer to alterations of glutamate and total N-acetylaspartate (tNAA) in this condition.Absolute quantities of tNAA, creatine, glutamate, glutamine, myoinositol and total choline were measured using 3 Tesla magnetic resonance spectroscopy of the left anterior cingulate cortex and the left cerebellum in 14 unmedicated women with BPD and comorbid attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and 18 healthy women. Both groups were matched with respect to age, education and premorbid intelligence.In the anterior cingulate, we found significantly higher tNAA and glutamate…
The attentional blink demonstrates automatic deviance processing in vision.
2011
Rare deviations in serial visual stimulation are accompanied by an occipital N2 in the event-related potential [the visual mismatch negativity (vMMN)]. Recent research suggests that the vMMN reflects automatic processing of information on the sensory level as a basis for change detection. To directly test the hypothesis that the vMMN is independent from attention, a rapid-serial-visual-presentation paradigm was applied: Either 300 ms or 700 ms after the presentation of a target (T1) a rare position change was embedded in the stimulation which elicited a vMMN. In another condition participants had to detect a second target (T2) after T1: Importantly, within 300 ms after T1, T2 detection was …
The influence of temporal factors on automatic priming and conscious expectancy in a simple reaction time task.
2009
In a previous study, we reported a dissociation between subjective expectancy and motor behaviour in a simple associative learning task (Perruchet, Cleeremans, & Destrebecqz, 2006). According to previous conditioning studies (Clark, Manns, & Squire, 2001), this dissociation is observed when the to-be-associated events coterminate and thus overlap in time (a training regimen called delay conditioning), but not when they are separated by a temporal delay (trace conditioning). In this latter situation indeed, there tends to be a direct relationship between subjective expectancy and behaviour. In this study, we further investigated this issue in a series of experiments where conscious …
Intra- and Interhemispheric Electroencephalogram Coherence in Siblings Discordant for Schizophrenia and Healthy Volunteers
1997
Former studies had pointed to an increased electroencephalogram (EEG) coherence in schizophrenics, but it remained unsolved whether this deviation represents the premorbid state or is only a consequence of the current or previous schizophrenic episodes. To clarify this question, we tested the hypothesis that subjects at elevated risk also reveal higher coherences compared to healthy controls. For that, intra- and interhemispheric EEG coherences were investigated in untreated schizophrenics, their healthy siblings, and healthy controls. Differences were only found regarding the intrahemispheric coherences. Both in schizophrenics and, even though to a lesser degree, in their siblings signific…
Tower of Hanoi and working memory in adult persons with intellectual disability
2001
Persons with intellectual disability (ID) have been found to perform more poorly than their mental age would suggest in the visuo-spatial problem solving task Tower of Hanoi (TOH). Inefficient performance has been assumed to be related to inability to use sophisticated problem solving strategies because of restricted working memory capacity. In the present study, the TOH performance of adult persons with ID was found to be equal to that of fluid-intelligence-matched general children. However, persons with ID violated the rules of the TOH more often, and needed more trials to solve the TOH problems than the children did. Visuo-spatial and executive working memory tasks were significantly con…
Size invariance in visual number discrimination
1991
This study deals with the observer's ability to discriminate the numerosity of two random dot-patterns irrespective of their relative size. One of these two patterns was a reference one that was always composed of 32 dots randomly distributed within a K x K invisible square window (K = 1.92 degrees). The second one was the test pattern with one of the five magnifications (K = 0.64 degrees, 1.28 degrees, 1.92 degrees, 2.56 degrees, 3.20 degrees) and the relative number of dots varied on 11 levels (N = -15, -12, -9, -6, -3, 0, 3, 6, 9, 12, or 15 dots). The observer's task was to indicate which of the two patterns contained more dots. The results show that the stimulus size, as an irrelevant s…
Working memory capacity affects trade-off between quality and quantity only when stimulus exposure duration is sufficient : Evidence for the two-phas…
2019
AbstractThe relation between visual working memory (VWM) capacity and attention has attracted much interest. In this study, we investigated the correlation between the participants’ VWM capacity and their ability to voluntarily trade off the precision and number of items remembered. The two-phase resource allocation model proposed by Ye et al. (2017) suggests that for a given set size, it takes a certain amount of consolidation time for an individual to control attention to adjust the VWM resources to trade off the precision and number. To verify whether trade-off ability varies across VWM capacity, we measured each individual’s VWM capacity and then conducted a colour recall task to examin…