Search results for "selective attention"
showing 10 items of 25 documents
Foraging Bumblebees Selectively Attend to Other Types of Bees Based on Their Reward-Predictive Value.
2020
Using social information can be an efficient strategy for learning in a new environment while reducing the risks associated with trial-and-error learning. Whereas social information from conspecifics has long been assumed to be preferentially attended by animals, heterospecifics can also provide relevant information. Because different species may vary in their informative value, using heterospecific social information indiscriminately can be ineffective and even detrimental. Here, we evaluated how selective use of social information might arise at a proximate level in bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) as a result of experience with demonstrators differing in their visual appearance and in thei…
Orientation-invariance of individual differences in three face processing tasks
2019
Numerous studies have reported impairments in perception and recognition, and, particularly, in part-integration of faces following picture-plane inversion. Whether these findings support the notion that inversion changes face processing qualitatively remains a topic of debate. To examine whether associations and dissociations of the human face processing ability depend on stimulus orientation, we measured face recognition with the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT), along with experimental tests of face perception and selective attention to faces and non-face objects in a sample of 314 participants. Results showed strong inversion effects for all face-related tasks, and modest ones for non-…
On Response Bias in the Face Congruency Effect for Internal and External Features
2017
Some years ago Cheung et al. (2008) proposed the complete design (CD) for measuring the failure of selective attention in composite objects. Since the CD is a fully balanced design, analysis of response bias may reveal potential effects of the experimental manipulation, the stimulus material, and/or attributes of the observers. Here we used the CD to prove whether external features modulate perception of internal features with the context congruency paradigm (Nachson et al., 1995; Meinhardt-Injac et al., 2010) in a larger sample of N = 303 subjects. We found a large congruency effect (Cohen's d = 1.78), which was attenuated by face inversion (d = 1.32). The congruency relation also strongly…
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…
Strategic inhibition of distractors with visual working memory contents after involuntary attention capture
2017
AbstractPrevious research has suggested that visual working memory (VWM) contents had a guiding effect on selective attention, and once participants realized that the distractors shared the same information with VWM contents in the search task, they would strategically inhibit the potential distractors with VWM contents. However, previous behavioral studies could not reveal the way how distractors with VWM contents are inhibited strategically. By employing the eye-tracking technique and a dual-task paradigm, we manipulated the probability of memory items occurring as distractors to explore this issue. Consistent with previous behavioral studies, the results showed that the inhibitory effect…
Effects of Selective Attention on Syntax Processing in Music and Language
2010
Abstract The present study investigated the effects of auditory selective attention on the processing of syntactic information in music and speech using event-related potentials. Spoken sentences or musical chord sequences were either presented in isolation, or simultaneously. When presented simultaneously, participants had to focus their attention either on speech, or on music. Final words of sentences and final harmonies of chord sequences were syntactically either correct or incorrect. Irregular chords elicited an early right anterior negativity (ERAN), whose amplitude was decreased when music was simultaneously presented with speech, compared to when only music was presented. However, t…
Binaural release from masking in forward-masked intensity discrimination: Evidence for effects of selective attention
2012
In a forward-masked intensity discrimination task, we manipulated the perceived lateralization of the masker via variation of the interaural time difference (ITD). The maskers and targets were 500 Hz pure tones with a duration of 30 ms. Standards of 30 and 60 dB SPL were combined with 60 or 90 dB SPL maskers. As expected, the presentation of a forward masker perceived as lateralized to the other side of the head as the target resulted in a significantly smaller elevation of the intensity difference limen than a masker lateralized ipsilaterally. This binaural release from masking in forward-masked intensity discrimination cannot be explained by peripheral mechanisms because varying the ITD l…
Health anxiety and attentional bias: the time course of vigilance and avoidance in light of pictorial illness information.
2011
Cognitive-behavioral models of health anxiety stress the importance of selective attention not only towards internal but also towards external health threat related stimuli. Yet, little is known about the time course of this attentional bias. The current study investigates threat related attentional bias in participants with varying degrees of health anxiety. Attentional bias was assessed using a visual dot-probe task with health-threat and neutral pictures at two exposure durations, 175ms and 500ms. A baseline condition was added to the dot-probe task to dissociate indices of vigilance towards threat and difficulties to disengage from threat. Substantial positive correlations of health anx…
The "ticktock" of our internal clock: direct brain evidence of subjective accents in isochronous sequences.
2003
The phenomenon commonly known as subjective accenting refers to the fact that identical sound events within purely isochronous sequences are perceived as unequal. Although subjective accenting has been extensively explored using behavioral methods, no physiological evidence has ever been provided for it. In the present study, we tested the notion that these perceived irregularities are related to the dynamic deployment of attention. We disrupted listeners' expectancies in different positions of auditory equitone sequences and measured their responses through brain event-related potentials (ERPs). Significant differences in a late parietal (P3-like) ERP component were found between the resp…
Data from: Individual differences in selective attention predict speech identification at a cocktail party
2017
Listeners with normal hearing show considerable individual differences in speech understanding when competing speakers are present, as in a crowded restaurant. Here, we show that one source of this variance are individual differences in the ability to focus selective attention on a target stimulus in the presence of distractors. In 50 young normal-hearing listeners, the performance in tasks measuring auditory and visual selective attention was associated with sentence identification in the presence of spatially separated competing speakers. Together, the measures of selective attention explained a similar proportion of variance as the binaural sensitivity for the acoustic temporal fine stru…