Attention as a multi-level system of weights and balances

Beyond Routine Maintenance: Current Trends in Working Memory Research

Working memory (WM) is an evolving concept. Our understanding of the neural functions that support WM develops iteratively alongside the approaches used to study it, and both can be profoundly shaped by available tools and prevailing theoretical paradigms. Here, the organizers of the 2024 Working Memory Symposium-inspired by this year's meeting-highlight current trends and looming questions in WM research. This review is organized into sections describing (1) ongoing efforts to characterize WM function across sensory modalities, (2) the growing appreciation that WM representations are malleable to context and future actions, (3) the enduring problem of how multiple WM items and features are structured and integrated, and (4) new insights about whether WM shares function with other cognitive processes that have conventionally been considered distinct. This review aims to chronicle where the field is headed and calls attention to issues that are paramount for future research.

Predictive coding and attention in developmental cognitive neuroscience and perspectives for neurodevelopmental disorders

Sensory prediction and repetition suppression are closely related cognitive mechanisms that allow the brain to form predictions about the environment, and guide perception in synergy with attention. Predictive coding is a theory of the fundamental role of predictive mechanisms in brain functions. Authors have proposed a central role of predictive impairments in autism and possibly other neurodevelopmental disorders. However, little is known about predictive mechanisms in typical development, and how they co-develop with attention. Here we review experimental support for predictive coding and its links with attention in healthy adults' brains, the first experimental works performed in typically developing children and infants, and theoretical accounts of neurodevelopmental disorders using a predictive coding framework. We propose future directions for predictive coding research in development. Finally, we describe the first predictive coding experiments in neonates and provide research perspectives for using this framework in searching for early markers of atypical neurodevelopment.

Dynamic modulation of spatial selection: Online and anticipatory adjustments in the flanker task

To track the spatiotemporal dynamics of selective attention, we constructed four theory-driven variants of Eriksen's flanker task. In each, subjects made speeded binary categorizations of target arrowhead direction while ignoring surrounding flanker arrowheads, whose direction was either congruent or incongruent to the target. Experiment 1 tracked the temporal evolution of target selection by systematically manipulating onset asynchrony between the target and flankers. In Experiments 2A and 2B, we increased flanker strength (both experiments) and reduced target strength (Experiment 2B only) at various times relative to target onset, exploring the effects of dynamic perceptual inputs on flanker congruency effects. Experiment 3 measured how uncertainty about stimulus location impeded spatial selection. Our findings demonstrate that spatial selection in the flanker task is dynamically modulated by both intra- and supra-trial factors.

Does familiarity-detection flip attention inward? The familiarity-flip-of-attention account of the primacy effect in memory for repetitions

In cognitive psychology, research on attention is shifting from focusing primarily on how people orient toward stimuli in the environment toward instead examining how people orient internally toward memory representations. With this new shift the question arises: What factors in the environment send attention inward? A recent proposal is that one factor is cue familiarity-detection (Cleary, Irving & Mills, Cognitive Science, 47, e13274, 2023). Within this theoretical framework, we reinterpret a decades-old empirical pattern-a primacy effect in memory for repetitions-in a novel way. The effect is the finding that altered repetitions of an image were remembered as re-occurrences of the first presentation despite having a changed left-right orientation; participants better retained the first orientation while incorrectly remembering changed instantiations as repetitions of the first orientation (DiGirolamo & Hintzman, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 4, 121-124, 1997). We argue that this pattern, which has never been fully explained, is an existing empirical test of the newly proposed mechanism of cue familiarity-detection flipping attention inward toward memory. Specifically, an image's first appearance is novel so draws attention outward toward encoding the stimulus' attributes like orientation; subsequent mirror-reversed appearances are detected as familiar so flip attention inward toward memory search, which leads to 1) inattentional blindness for the changed orientation due to the familiarity-driven shift of attention inward and 2) memory retrieval of the first instance and its orientation, thereby enhancing memory for the first instance and its previously encoded attributes like orientation.

Hypervigilance strikes a balance between external and internal attention: behavioral and modeling evidence from the switching attention task

Hypervigilance involves increased attentional scanning of the environment to facilitate the detection of possible threats. Accordingly, this state is mostly bound to external attention and as a corollary, it might be detrimental to internal attention and further affect attentional balance defined as the ability to switch dynamically between these two domains. In the current study, we aimed to address this question and induced hypervigilance in 49 healthy participants through the presentation of a task-unrelated aversive sound while they performed the switching attention task (SAT), which was previously devised to study attentional balance. The skin conductance response results, as well as subjective sound ratings, confirmed that the hypervigilance manipulation was successful. At the behavioral level, hypervigilance led to a more symmetrical balance between internal and external attention compared to the control and neutral conditions, where it was asymmetrical, replicating previous studies. Moreover, using a drift diffusion model, we found that hypervigilance reduced the drift rate for internal repetition trials, suggesting that hypervigilance possibly caused an impaired shielding of internal attention.

Read the Feed: High-Emotion Simulation of Preterm Feeding to Enhance Graduate-Level Training

PURPOSE

Therapeutic bottle feeding is a critical skill for speech-language pathologists (SLPs) managing the increasing and medically complex neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and early intervention caseloads. Thus, we explored the role of a high-emotion preterm simulator, known as "Paul," to increase knowledge, skills, and confidence related to infant feeding management for speech-language pathology graduate students.

METHOD

A randomized controlled study compared learning outcomes of 27 participants following either a 1-hr lecture or 1-hr training with a preterm simulator. Outcomes included knowledge demonstrated on written examination, accuracy in identifying stress cues during simulated feeding, and self-reported anxiety levels related to clinically assessing infant feeding.

RESULTS

No baseline group differences were found on written examination or during a simulated bottle feeding. Both groups improved in written examination scores and identification of stress cues (p < .001). Gains in written examination scores did not significantly differ between groups; however, after training, the simulator group correctly identified more stress cues during a simulated bottle feeding (p < .001), and the lecture group reported reduced anxiety related to clinically evaluating infant feeding compared to simulator-trained students (p < .05).

CONCLUSIONS

All students demonstrated gains in written knowledge and identification of stress cues; however, simulation-based training was superior in developing the feeders' ability to identify stress cues during a hands-on simulated bottle-feeding scenario. Lecture-based training may have inflated students' perceptions in their clinical skills as they were less accurate in identifying stress cues during a simulated feeding but reported significantly reduced anxiety for administering a clinical evaluation of infant feeding compared to simulation-trained students. Hands-on training using high-fidelity simulation may capitalize on experiential learning to better build clinical feeding skills for future SLPs who may serve in NICU and early intervention settings, while eliminating the risk of potential errors during learning that could affect fragile neonates.

Virtual Reality Sickness Reduces Attention During Immersive Experiences

In this paper, we show that Virtual Reality (VR) sickness is associated with a reduction in attention, which was detected with the P3b Event-Related Potential (ERP) component from electroencephalography (EEG) measurements collected in a dual-task paradigm. We hypothesized that sickness symptoms such as nausea, eyestrain, and fatigue would reduce the users' capacity to pay attention to tasks completed in a virtual environment, and that this reduction in attention would be dynamically reflected in a decrease of the P3b amplitude while VR sickness was experienced. In a user study, participants were taken on a tour through a museum in VR along paths with varying amounts of rotation, shown previously to cause different levels of VR sickness. While paying attention to the virtual museum (the primary task), participants were asked to silently count tones of a different frequency (the secondary task). Control measurements for comparison against the VR sickness conditions were taken when the users were not wearing the Head-Mounted Display (HMD) and while they were immersed in VR but not moving through the environment. This exploratory study shows, across multiple analyses, that the effect mean amplitude of the P3b collected during the task is associated with both sickness severity measured after the task with a questionnaire (SSQ) and with the number of counting errors on the secondary task. Thus, VR sickness may impair attention and task performance, and these changes in attention can be tracked with ERP measures as they happen, without asking participants to assess their sickness symptoms in the moment.

When the mind's eye prevails: The Internal Dominance over External Attention (IDEA) hypothesis

Throughout the 20th century, the psychological literature has considered attention as being primarily directed at the outside world. More recent theories conceive attention as also operating on internal information, and mounting evidence suggests a single, shared attentional focus between external and internal information. Such sharing implies a cognitive architecture where attention needs to be continuously shifted between prioritizing either external or internal information, but the fundamental principles underlying this attentional balancing act are currently unknown. Here, we propose and evaluate one such principle in the shape of the Internal Dominance over External Attention (IDEA) hypothesis: Contrary to the traditional view of attention as being primarily externally oriented, IDEA asserts that attention is inherently biased toward internal information. We provide a theoretical account for why such an internal attention bias may have evolved and examine findings from a wide range of literatures speaking to the balancing of external versus internal attention, including research on working memory, attention switching, visual search, mind wandering, sustained attention, and meditation. We argue that major findings in these disparate research lines can be coherently understood under IDEA. Finally, we consider tentative neurocognitive mechanisms contributing to IDEA and examine the practical implications of more deliberate control over this bias in the context of psychopathology. It is hoped that this novel hypothesis motivates cross-talk between the reviewed research lines and future empirical studies directly examining the mechanisms that steer attention either inward or outward on a moment-by-moment basis.

Predictability reduces event file retrieval

There is growing consensus that stimulus-response bindings (event files) play a central role in human action control. Here, we investigated how the integration and the retrieval of event files are affected by the predictability of stimulus components of event files. We used the distractor-response binding paradigm, in which nominally task-irrelevant distractors are repeated or alternated from a prime to a probe display. The typical outcome of these kinds of tasks is that the effects of distractor repetition and response repetition interact: Performance is worse if the distractor repeats but the response does not, or vice versa. This partial-repetition effect was reduced when the distractor was highly predictable (Experiment 1). Separate manipulations of distractor predictability in the prime and probe trial revealed that this pattern was only replicated if the probe distractors were predictable (Experiment 2b, 3), but not if prime distractors were predictable (Experiment 2a). This suggests that stimulus predictability does not affect the integration of distractor information into event files, but the retrieval of these files when one or more of the integrated features are repeated. We take our findings to support theoretical claims that integration and retrieval of event files might differ concerning their sensitivity to top-down factors.