Interests shape how adolescents pay attention: the interaction of motivation and top-down attentional processes in biasing sensory activations to anticipated events

The effect of visual attention process and thinking styles on environmental aesthetic preference: An eye-tracking study

People often form different aesthetic preferences for natural and built environments, which affects their behavioral intention; however, it remains unknown whether this difference in aesthetic preference is due to differences in thinking styles. However, whether tourists' aesthetic preferences differ when using different visual attention processes has not been studied further. This study used eye-tracking and self-reporting to investigate these questions. The results show that natural environment images are more favored visually because they can evoke in tourists larger pupil diameters and longer scan paths, but we found no significant difference in fixation duration and fixation counts. We also found that the scanning path of tourists who predominantly rely on intuitive thinking is modulated by the bottom-up attention process, while the scanning path of tourists who prefer rational thinking is modulated by the top-down attention process. In the bottom-up process, tourists who prefer rational thinking exhibit more positive aesthetic preferences and emotional arousal. In summary, the present study verified that aesthetic preference is more likely to be influenced by both thinking style and visual attention processing. The results of the present work provide preliminary evidence that the aesthetic preference of the environment is not only related to visual attention but also affected by the individual visual attention process and thinking style.

Improved Cognitive Vigilance Assessment after Artifact Reduction with Wavelet Independent Component Analysis

Vigilance level assessment is of prime importance to avoid life-threatening human error. Critical working environments such as air traffic control, driving, or military surveillance require the operator to be alert the whole time. The electroencephalogram (EEG) is a very common modality that can be used in assessing vigilance. Unfortunately, EEG signals are prone to artifacts due to eye movement, muscle contraction, and electrical noise. Mitigating these artifacts is important for an accurate vigilance level assessment. Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is an effective method and has been extensively used in the suppression of EEG artifacts. However, in vigilance assessment applications, it was found to suffer from leakage of the cerebral activity into artifacts. In this work, we show that the wavelet ICA (wICA) method provides an alternative for artifact reduction, leading to improved vigilance level assessment results. We conducted an experiment in nine human subjects to induce two vigilance states, alert and vigilance decrement, while performing a Stroop Color-Word Test for approximately 45 min. We then compared the performance of the ICA and wICA preprocessing methods using five classifiers. Our classification results showed that in terms of features extraction, the wICA method outperformed the existing ICA method. In the delta, theta, and alpha bands, we obtained a mean classification accuracy of 84.66% using the ICA method, whereas the mean accuracy using the wICA methodwas 96.9%. However, no significant improvement was observed in the beta band. In addition, we compared the topographical map to show the changes in power spectral density across the brain regions for the two vigilance states. The proposed method showed that the frontal and central regions were most sensitive to vigilance decrement. However, in this application, the proposed wICA shows a marginal improvement compared to the Fast-ICA.

Phasic alerting facilitates endogenous orienting of spatial attention: Evidence from event-related lateralizations of the EEG

Alerting has been hypothesized to affect spatial orienting either by accelerating the speed of attentional shift toward the cued target location (the accelerating hypothesis) or by enhancing the orienting effect without changing its time course (the enhancing hypothesis). To investigate the neural underpinnings of the effect of phasic alerting on endogenous orienting, we recorded the electroencephalogram (EEG) in a variant of the spatial cueing task with a tone presented 100 ms before the cue as a phasic alerting signal, and calculated cue-evoked event-related lateralizations (ERLs) providing a precise assessment of preparatory visuospatial attention. Behavioral results showed that the spatial orienting effect was increased under the phasic alerting condition, as expected. The EEG results showed that an orienting-related ERL component called a late directing attention positivity (LDAP) had shorter onset latency and larger amplitude in the alerting condition than in the no-alerting (no-tone) condition. In conclusion, phasic alerting seems to both accelerate and enhance orienting-related preparatory modulations within the ventral visual stream.

Investigating the Effect of Intrinsic Motivation on Alpha Desynchronization Using Sample Entropy

The effect of motivation and attention could play an important role in providing personalized learning services and improving learners toward smart education. These effects on brain activity could be quantified by EEG and open the path to analyze the efficiency of services during the learning process. Many studies reported the appearance of EEG alpha desynchronization during the attention period, resulting in better cognitive performance. Motivation was also found to be reflected in EEG. This study investigated the effect of intrinsic motivation on the alpha desynchronization pattern in terms of the complexity of time series data. The sample entropy method was used to quantify the complexity of event-related spectral perturbation (ERSP) of EEG data. We found that when participants can remember the stimulus, ERSP was significantly less complex than when they cannot. However, the effect of intrinsic motivation cannot be defined by using sample entropy directly. ERSP’s main effect showed that motivation affects the complexity of ERSP data; longer continuous alpha desynchronization patterns were found when participants were motivated. Therefore, we introduced an algorithm to identify the longest continuous alpha desynchronization pattern. The method allowed us to understand that intrinsic motivation has an effect on recognition at the frontal and left parietal area directly.

The need for cognition mediates and moderates the association between depressive symptoms and impaired effortful control

Previous studies have shown a negative correlation between effortful control (EC) and depressive symptoms. EC is defined as the efficiency of executive attention, which may be reduced by the attentional impairment associated with depression. However, the mechanism underlying this correlation is still unclear. We investigated the relationship between EC and depressive symptoms with the hypothesis that cognitive motivation, or need for cognition (NfC), is a possible mediator of this relationship. Participants were 178 Japanese university students. Each completed the Zung Self-Rating Depression Scale, Effortful Control Scale, and Need for Cognition Scale at baseline and follow-up assessments. Supporting our hypothesis, mediation analyses revealed a significant indirect effect of depressive symptoms on EC that was mediated by NfC. In addition, our data demonstrated a direct effect of depressive symptoms on EC. Longitudinal analysis indicated that an increase in depression and a decrease in NfC occurred synchronously, while NfC predicted an increase in EC over time. Depressive symptoms may decrease executive functioning and effortful control both directly and indirectly, the latter effect being mediated by motivation. These findings imply that a motivational deficit may partially explain the decreased EC found in people suffering from depression.