It is well-documented that emotional stimuli impact both the cognitive and motor aspects of “goal-directed” behavior. However, how emotional distractors impact motor performance remains unclear. This study aimed to characterize how movement quality was impacted during emotional distractors. We used a modified oddball paradigm and documented the performance of pure movement. Participants were designated to draw a triangle or a polygon, while an emotional stimulus was presented. Speed was assessed using reaction time and movement time. The quality and precision (...) of movement were assessed by calculating the accuracy and root-mean-square error. Compared to drawings of triangles, polygons had higher accuracy under negative stimuli, but lower RMSE under positive stimuli. The results indicate that distracting emotional stimuli impact different aspects of movement quality, with movement complexity influencing accuracy under negative distractors and precision under positive distractors. This study provides further evidence that movement precision is an important feature of emotional embodiment that should be incorporated in future studies. (shrink)

The ability to resist distracting stimuli whilst voluntarily focusing on a task is fundamental to our everyday cognitive functioning. Here, we investigated how this ability develops, and thereafter declines, across the lifespan using a single task/experiment. Young children (5–7 years), older children (10–11 years), young adults (20–27 years), and older adults (62–86 years) were presented with complex visual scenes. Endogenous (voluntary) attention was engaged by having the participants search for a visual target presented on either the left or (...) right side of the display. The onset of the visual scenes was preceded – at stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) of 50, 200, or 500 ms – by a task-irrelevant sound (an exogenous crossmodal spatial distractor) delivered either on the same or opposite side as the visual target, or simultaneously on both sides (cued, uncued, or neutral trials, respectively). Age-related differences were revealed, especially in the extreme age-groups, which showed a greater impact of crossmodal spatial distractors. Young children were highly susceptible to exogenous spatial distraction at the shortest SOA (50 ms), whereas older adults were distracted at all SOAs, showing significant exogenous capture effects during the visual search task. By contrast, older children and young adults' search performance was not significantly affected by crossmodal spatial distraction. Overall, these findings present a detailed picture of the developmental trajectory of endogenous resistance to crossmodal spatial distraction from childhood to old age and demonstrate a different efficiency in coping with distraction across the four age-groups studied. (shrink)

Evidence has shown that negative distracting stimuli are most difficult to control when we are focused in a relevant task, while positive and neutral distractors might be equally overcome. Still, r...

This commentary is a review of the findings and ideas reported in the preceding nine articles on the effects of distraction on aspects of cognitive performance. The articles themselves deal with the disruptive effects of distraction on recall of words, objects and events, also on visual processing, category formation and other cognitive tasks. The commentary assesses the part played by “domain-general” suppression of distracting information and the “domain-specific” competition arising when tasks and distraction involve very similar material. Some forms (...) of distraction are meaningfully relevant to the ongoing task, and Treisman’s (1964) model of selective attention is invoked to provide an account of findings in this area. Finally, individual differences to vulnerability to distraction are discussed; older adults are particularly affected by distracting stimuli although the failure to repress distraction can sometimes prove beneficial to later cognitive performance. (shrink)

The mere presence of irrelevant external stimuli results in interference with the fidelity of details retrieved from long-term memory (LTM). Recent studies suggest that distractibility during LTM retrieval occurs when the focus of resource-limited, top-down mechanisms that guide the selection of relevant mnemonic details is disrupted by representations of external distractors. We review findings from four studies that reveal distractibility during episodic retrieval. The approach cued participants to recall previously studied visual details when their eyes were closed, or were (...) open and irrelevant visual information was present. The results showed a negative impact of the distractors on the fidelity of details retrieved from LTM. An fMRI experiment using the same paradigm replicated the behavioral results and found that diminished episodic memory was associated with the disruption of functional connectivity in whole-brain networks. Specifically, network connectivity supported recollection of details based on visual imagery when eyes were closed, but connectivity declined in the presence of visual distractors. Another experiment using auditory distractors found equivalent effects for auditory and visual distraction during cued recall, suggesting that the negative impact of distractibility is a domain-general phenomenon in LTM. Comparisons between older and younger adults revealed an aging-related increase in the negative impact of distractibility on retrieval of LTM. Finally, a new study that compared categorization abilities between younger and older adults suggests a cause underlying age-related decline of visual details in LTM. The sum of our findings suggests that cognitive control resources, although limited, have the capability to resolve interference from distractors during tasks of moderate effort, but these resources are overwhelmed when additional processes associated with episodic retrieval, or categorization of complex prototypes, are required. (shrink)

Most of us struggle with distraction every day: the familiar feeling that our attention is not quite where it should be. We feel it at work and at home and it can be frustrating and uncomfortable. But what is distraction? In his lucid, timely book, Damon Young shows that distraction is more than too many stimuli, or too little attention. It is actually a matter of value - to be distracted is to be torn away from what is worthwhile (...) in life. And for Young, what is most worthwhile is freedom: not simply rights or legal liberties, but the capacity to patiently, creatively craft one's own life. Exploring the lives of such luminaries as Henri Matisse, Karl Marx, Seneca and Henry James, Young exposes distraction in work, technology, art, politics and intimacy. With warmth and wit, he reveals what is most valuable, and what is best avoided, in the pursuit of a life of one's own. (shrink)

This article reviews recent cognitive and neurological approaches to the study of attention. It argues that such research is based on the notion that attention has a positive cognitive function selecting, like a sieve or a filter, elements from the background and foreground, to then be processed by the brain and made conscious when required. These approaches fail to explain cognitive overload and recent findings demonstrating that recognition and understanding—sensory, visual and semantic—also occur prior to attention. Merleau-Ponty and Freud offer (...) a different model: a negative distractive attention. Negative distractive attention serves as a threshold for stimuli excluded by neurological processes regulating overload and ensuring that consciousness can concentrate on the singularity of its objects. Such approach to attention explains how one can drive and talk. It is not a positive multi-tasking model but a negative distractive one. (shrink)

: Research done in recent years shows that Virtual Reality can be an effective tool for distracting attention from pain. The purpose of this study was to test how the complexity of Virtual Environment influences the experienced intensity of thermal pain stimuli. A within-subjects design experiment was conducted, using cold pressor test for pain stimulation. Research was done on 31 students of Wroclaw Universities. Participants played games created for the purpose of the study, using head mounted displays and (...) movement sensors. Two Virtual Environments differing in the level of complexity and non-VR control condition were used. The order of all conditions was counterbalanced. Participants reported significantly lower pain intensity after playing the high complexity game, compared to the low complexity game. There were also significant differences between non-VR control condition and high complexity game, but not between non-VR and low complexity game. The pain tolerance was significantly higher in both VR conditions comparing to non-VR conditions. However, no significant differences between VE’s were found in pain tolerance ratings. Results of this study provide preliminary evidence that game complexity can be related to pain experience during VR interventions. (shrink)

Romantic love is associated with mind wandering about the beloved. We tested associations between mind wandering about the beloved and infatuation, attachment, self-reported distraction, task performance, and enjoyment. Participants who were in love completed self-report measures and a sustained attention response task with thought probes. Participants reported thinking about their beloved for 67% of the time in general and up to 42% of the time during task performance. Thinking about the beloved in general was positively associated with infatuation (passionate love) (...) but not with attachment (companionate love). The more time participants reported thinking about their beloved in general, the more distracting they found it and the less they could withhold a response to no go stimuli. The more participants thought about their beloved during the task, the slower their responses to go stimuli were. In contrast to the negative terminology typically used to describe frequent thoughts about the beloved, such as intrusive or obsessive thinking, participants overwhelmingly enjoyed thinking about their beloved. The findings suggest that romantic love impairs cognitive task performance because people are thinking about their beloved instead, which may negatively impact performance at school and work. Nevertheless, people seem to greatly enjoy thinking about their beloved. (shrink)

Inattentional Blindness occurs when observers engaged in resource-consuming tasks fail to see unexpected stimuli that appear in their visual field. Eye movements were recorded in a dynamic IB task where participants tracked targets amongst distractors. During the task, an unexpected stimulus crossed the screen for several seconds. Individuals who failed to report the unexpected stimulus were deemed to be IB. Being IB was associated with making more fixations and longer gaze times on distractor stimuli, being less likely to (...) fixate the unexpected stimulus, and having lower working memory capacity than those who were not IB. Noticing the unexpected stimulus was not contingent upon fixating it, suggesting that some individuals processed the unexpected stimulus via covert attention. The findings support earlier research on working memory and IB. In addition, IBs were less efficient attentional allocators than those who were not IB, as reflected in their eye tracking of irrelevant distractors. (shrink)

Although substantial evidence demonstrates that directing attention to specific items is important for improving the performance of visual working memory, it is still not clear whether the attended items were better protected. The present study, thus, adopted a pre-cueing paradigm to examine the effect of attention direction and perceptual distractor on VWM. The results showed that a valid visual cue improved the individuals’ VWM performances and reduced their reaction time compared to the invalid and neutral cues. However, the VWM performances (...) in the valid and neutral cue conditions were more disrupted by a post-stimuli distractor compared to the invalid cue condition. The findings suggest that although directing attention can improve the VWM performance, it is not efficient in protecting information from being distracted. (shrink)

The neural basis of phonological working memory was investigated through an examination of the effects of irrelevant speech distractors and disruptive neural stimulation from transcranial magnetic stimulation. Embedded processes models argue that the same regions involved in speech perception are used to support phonological WM whereas buffer models assume that a region separate from speech perception regions is used to support WM. Thus, according to the embedded processes approach but not the buffer approach, irrelevant speech and TMS to the speech (...) perception region should disrupt the decoding of phonological WM representations. According to the buffer account, decoding of WM items should be possible in the buffer region despite distraction and should be disrupted with TMS to this region. Experiment 1 used fMRI and representational similarity analyses with a delayed recognition memory paradigm using nonword stimuli. Results showed that decoding of memory items in the speech perception regions was possible in the absence of distractors. However, the decoding evidence in the left STG was susceptible to interference from distractors presented during the delay period whereas decoding in the proposed buffer region persisted. Experiment 2 examined the causal roles of the speech processing region and the buffer region in phonological WM performance using TMS. TMS to the SMG during the early delay period caused a disruption in recognition performance for the memory nonwords, whereas stimulations at the STG and an occipital control region did not affect WM performance. Taken together, results from the two experiments are consistent with predictions of a buffer model of phonological WM, pointing to a critical role of the left SMG in maintaining phonological representations. (shrink)

It has been consistently demonstrated that fear-relevant images capture attention preferentially over fear-irrelevant images. Current theory suggests that this faster processing could be mediated by an evolved module that allows certain stimulus features to attract attention automatically, prior to the detailed processing of the image. The present research investigated whether simplified images of fear-relevant stimuli would produce interference with target detection in a visual search task. In Experiment 1, silhouettes and degraded silhouettes of fear-relevant animals produced more interference than (...) did the fear-irrelevant images. Experiment 2, compared the effects of fear-relevant and fear-irrelevant distracters and confirmed that the interference produced by fear-relevant distracters was not an effect of novelty. Experiment 3 suggested that fear-relevant stimuli produced interference regardless of whether participants were instructed as to the content of the images. The three experiments indicate that even very simplistic images of fear-relevant animals can divert attention. (shrink)

Novelty seeking is regarded as a core feature in substance use disorders. However, few studies thus far have investigated this feature in problematic Internet pornography use. The main aim of the present study was to examine group differences in electrophysiological activity associated with novelty processing in participants with high tendencies toward PIPU vs. low tendencies using event-related potentials. Twenty-seven participants with high tendencies toward PIPU and 25 with low tendencies toward PIPU completed a modified three-stimulus oddball task while electroencephalogram was (...) recorded. Participants were instructed to detect neutral target stimuli from distracting stimuli. The distracting stimuli contained a familiar sexual stimulus and a set of novel sexual stimuli. The novel-familiar difference waves were calculated to identify specific group difference in novelty effect. While both groups demonstrated a sustained novelty effect in the late positive potential within the 500–800 ms time windows, the novelty effect was greater in the high tendencies toward PIPU group than in the low tendencies toward PIPU group. This result suggests that individuals with high tendencies toward PIPU allocate more attentional resources for novelty processing. Enhanced brain responding to novel sexual stimuli may facilitate pornographic consumption and play an essential role in the development and maintenance of PIPU. (shrink)

Inhibition involves the withholding or suppressing of attention or responses to irrelevant or distracting stimuli. We examined the relationship between five experimental tasks of inhibition, represented by two measures of executive, intentional control inhibition and three measures of motivational inhibition characterized by bottom-up interruption of affective and reward/punishment sensitive mechanisms. Associations between these experimental tasks with three self-report measures related to inhibition were also examined. Correlational analyses indicated a small but significant association between the measures in the executive (...) domain , but a lack of associations between the measures in the motivational domain . Both measures of executive and motivational inhibition entered as significant predictors on the self-report measures related to inhibition in simultaneous regression analyses, but not consistently in the expected direction. The results suggest that inhibition is not a unitary construct, and demonstrate an association between experimental measures of inhibition and self-report measures related to inhibition. (shrink)

Distractibility is one of the key features of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and has been associated with alterations in the neural orienting and alerting networks. Task-irrelevant stimuli are thus expected to have detrimental effects on the performance of patients with ADHD. However, task-irrelevant presentation of novel sounds seems to have the opposite effect and improve subsequent attentional performance particularly in patients with ADHD. Here, we aimed to understand the neural modulations of the attention networks underlying these improvements. Fifty boys (...) participated in a functional magnetic resonance imaging study in which unique or repeatedly presented sounds were placed before a visual flanker task in 2/3 of the trials. We found that presenting any sound improved task performance in all participants, but the underlying neural mechanisms differed for the type of sound. Familiar sounds led to a stronger increase in activity in the left posterior insula in patients with ADHD compared to typically developing peers. Novel sounds led to activations of the fronto-temporoparietal ventral attention network, likewise in ADHD and TD. These changes in signaling by novelty in the right inferior frontal gyrus were directly related to improved response speed showing that neural orienting network activity following novel sounds facilitated subsequent attentional performance. This mechanism of behavioral enhancement by short distractions could potentially be useful for cognitive trainings or homework situations. (shrink)

It has been debated whether the so-called attention economy, in which the attention of agents is measured and sold, jeopardizes something of value. One strand of this discussion has focused on so-called attention rights, asking: should attention be legally protected, either by introducing novel rights or by extending the scope of pre-existing rights? In this paper, however, in order to further this discussion, we ask: How is attention already protected legally? In what situations does a person have the right to (...) attention under current law? -/- Unlike (Chomanski, Neuroethics 16:1–11, 2023), who discusses an overall right to attention, or (Puri, Rutgers Law Record 48:206–221, 2021), who discusses an overall right to attentional privacy, in this paper we focus on two types of situations in which a person’s attention is already protected by legal regulation. Sustained attention-requiring tasks can be jeopardized by distractions whereas attentiveness to certain kind of stimuli can be jeopardized by immersive stimuli. That is why distractions are regulated in situations where an agent has what we call a concentration right and immersive stimuli are regulated in situations where an agent has what we call a duty to be attentive. The further analysis of these situations provides an understanding of the legal means by which attention is already regulated, which can be helpful when thinking about how it should be regulated in the future. (shrink)

Psychopathy is associated with a deficit in affective processes and might be reflected in the inability to extract the emotional content of a stimulus. Across two experiments, we measured the interference effect from emotional images that were irrelevant to the processing of simultaneous target stimuli and examined if this interference was moderated by psychometrically defined traits of psychopathy. In Experiment 1, we showed this emotional distraction effect was reduced as a function of psychopathic traits related to cold-heartedness and occurred (...) for both positively- and negatively-valenced images. Experiment 2 attempted to test the automaticity of the effects by presenting the emotional stimuli briefly so that the emotion was difficult to report. Again, high visibility images produced strong effects that were moderated by the cold-heatedness/meanness traits of psychopathy, but the low-visibility images did not evoke the emotional distractor effect. Our results strongly support the notion that psychopathic traits related to cold-heartedness/meanness are associated with an inability to automatically process the emotional content of images. (shrink)

In this paper we introduce the concept of attentional scaffolds and show the resemblance between social media platforms and slot machines, both functioning as hostile attentional scaffolds. The first section establishes the groundwork for the concept of attentional scaffolds and draws parallels to the mechanics of slot machines, to argue that social media platforms aim to capture users’ attention to maximize engagement through a system of intermittent rewards. The second section shifts focus to the interplay between emotions and attention, revealing (...) how online attentional capture through emotionally triggering stimuli leads to distraction. The final section elucidates the collective implications of scaffolding attention through social media platforms. The examination of phenomena such as emotional contagion and the emergence of group emotions underscores the transition from individual experiences to shared collective outcomes. Employing online moral outrage as a case study, we illustrate how negative emotions serve as scaffolds for individuals’ attention, propagate within social groups, and give rise to collective attitudes. (shrink)

The evolutionary argument is one of the most well-known empirical arguments against epiphenomenalism. In its most persuasive form, it aims to show that because of evolutionary considerations, the smooth correlations between painful qualia and noxious stimuli would be highly unexpected if epiphenomenalism were true, but just what we would expect if an alternative mind--body theory were. Thus, the presence of these correlations is strong evidence against epiphenomenalism. After formulating a canonical version of the argument, I demonstrate that the evolutionary (...) evidence adduced as part of it is superfluous, and could easily be jettisoned without damaging whatever force the argument has. I then proceed to show an even stronger result -- that the evolutionary evidence is actually nothing more than a distraction from the elements of the argument that actually give it its dialectical strength. (shrink)

I argue that a study of the Nicomachean Ethics and of the Parva Naturalia shows that Aristotle had a notion of attention. This notion captures the common aspects of apparently different phenomena like perceiving something vividly, being distracted by a loud sound or by a musical piece, focusing on a geometrical problem. For Aristotle, these phenomena involve a specific selectivity that is the outcome of the competition between different cognitive stimuli. This selectivity is attention. I argue that Aristotle studied (...) the common aspects of the physiological processes at the basis of attention and its connection with pleasure. His notion can explain perceptual attention and intellectual attention as voluntary or involuntary phenomena. In addition, it sheds light on how attention and enjoyment can enhance our cognitive activities. (shrink)

We investigated in two experiments whether selective attention processes modulate evaluative conditioning. Based on the fact that the typical stimuli in an EC paradigm involve an affect-laden unconditioned stimulus and a neutral conditioned stimulus, we started from the assumption that learning might depend in part upon selective attention to the US. Attention to the US was manipulated by including a variant of the Eriksen flanker task in the EC paradigm. Similarly to the original Flanker paradigm, we implemented a target-distracter (...) logic by introducing the CS as the task-relevant stimulus to which the participants had to respond and the US as a task-irrelevant distracter. Experiment 1 showed that CS–US congruence modulated EC if the CS had to be selected against the US. Specifically, EC was more pronounced for congruent CS–US pairs as compared to incongruent CS–US pairs. Experiment 2 disentangled CS–US congruence and CS–US compatibility and suggested that it is indeed CS–US stimulus congruence rather than CS–US response compatibility that modulates EC. (shrink)

Peripheral vision has different functional priorities for mammals than foveal vision. One of its roles is to monitor the environment while central vision is focused on the current task. Becoming distracted too easily would be counterproductive in this perspective, so the brain should react to behaviourally relevant changes. Gist processing is good for this purpose, and it is therefore not surprising that evidence from both functional brain imaging and behavioural research suggests a tendency to generalize and blend information in the (...) periphery. This may be caused by the balance of perceptual influence in the periphery between bottom-up and top-down processing channels. Here, we investigated this interaction behaviourally using a peripheral numerosity discrimination task with top-down and bottom-up manipulations. Participants compared numerosity between the left and right peripheries of a screen. Each periphery was divided into a centre and a surrounding area, only one of which was a task relevant target region. Our top-down task modulation was the instruction which area to attend – centre or surround. We varied the signal strength by altering the stimuli durations i.e., the amount of information presented/processed. We found that numerosity perceived in target regions was affected by contextual information in neighbouring areas. This effect appeared as soon as stimulus duration allowed the task to be reliably performed and persisted even at the longest duration. We compared the pattern of results with an ideal-observer model and found a qualitative difference in the way centre and surround areas interacted perceptually in the periphery. When participants reported on the central area, the irrelevant surround would affect the response as a weighted combination – consistent with the idea of a receptive field focused in the target area to which irrelevant surround stimulation leaks in. When participants report on surround, we can best describe the response with a model in which occasionally the attention switches from task relevant surround to task irrelevant centre – consistent with a selection model of two competing streams of information. Overall our results show that the influence of spatial context in the periphery is mandatory but task dependent. (shrink)

It is thought that just as hunger itself, the expectancy to eat impacts attention and cognitive control toward food stimuli, but this theory has not been extensively explored at a behavioral level. In order to study the effect of expectancy to eat on attentional and cognitive control mechanisms, 63 healthy fasting participants were presented with an affective priming spatial compatibility Simon task that included both food and object distracters. The participants were randomly assigned to two groups: an “immediate expectancy” (...) group made up of participants who expected to eat immediately after the task and a “delayed expectancy” cohort made up of individuals who expected to eat a few hours later. Slower reaction times toward the food and non-food distracters and a more pronounced effect on the RTs in the incompatible condition [i.e., the Simon effect ] were noted in both groups. The effect of the food and non-food distracters on the RTs was more pronounced in the immediate with respect to the delayed expectancy group. The magnitude of the SE for the food and the non-food distracters was also greater in the immediate with respect to the delayed expectancy group. These results seem to indicate that when the expectancy to eat is short, the RTs are delayed, and the SE is more pronounced when food and non-food distracters are presented. Instead, when the expectancy to eat is more distant, the distracters have less of an effect on the RTs and the correspondence effect is smaller. Our results suggest that the expectancy to eat can modulate both attention orienting and cognitive control mechanisms in healthy fasting individuals when distracting details are competing with information processing during goal directed behavior. (shrink)

Previous research has found that depression is characterised by biased processing of emotional information. Although most studies have examined cognitive biases in isolation, simultaneous examination of multiple biases is required to understand how they may interact and influence one another to produce depression vulnerability. In this study, the attention and memory biases of currently depressed, previously depressed, and never depressed women were examined using the same stimuli and a unified methodology. Participants viewed negative, positive, and neutral words while their (...) eye gaze was tracked and recorded. After a distraction task, participants completed an incidental recognition test that included words from the eye-tracking task and new words. The results supported the hypothesised mediation model for positive words: currently depressed women had a reduced attention bias for positive words and, in turn, had poorer memory for positive words relative to never depressed women. Previously depressed women, however, showed a lack of coherence between attention and memory biases for positive words. The groups did not differ in their attention or memory biases for negative words. The findings provide novel evidence in support of a causal link between the absence of protective attention and memory biases for positive information in clinical depression. (shrink)

Improving emotion regulation is central to borderline personality disorder (BPD) treatment, but little research indicates which emotion regulation strategies are optimally effective and when. Basic emotion science suggests that engagement emotion regulation strategies that process emotional content become less effective as emotional intensity increases, whereas disengagement strategies that disengage from it do not. This study examined whether emotional reactivity to emotional stimuli predicts the effectiveness of engagement and disengagement emotion regulation across self-report, general physiologic (heart rate), sympathetic (skin conductance (...) responses), and parasympathetic (respiratory sinus arrythmia) emotion in BPD, healthy, and clinical control (i.e. generalized anxiety disorder; GAD) groups. 120 participants (40 per group) were exposed to emotion inductions and then instructed to implement engagement (mindful awareness) and disengagement (distraction) strategies while self-report and physiological emotion measurements were taken. In the BPD and GAD groups, higher heart rate or respiratory sinus arrythmia reactivity, respectively, predicted improved mindful awareness effectiveness. Higher skin conductance reactivity predicted worsened distraction effectiveness in BPD. Higher reactivity may potentiate engagement emotion regulation, and exacerbate disengagement from emotional content, in BPD. Future research should examine other domains of emotion regulation that may be influenced by emotional intensity, and other forms of emotional intensity that may influence them. (shrink)

Background. Attending to goal-relevant information can leave us metaphorically ‘blind’ or ‘deaf’ to the next relevant information while searching among distracters. This temporal cost lasting for about a half a second on the human selective attention has been long explored using the attentional blink paradigm. Although there is evidence that certain visual stimuli relating to one’s area of expertise can be less susceptible to attentional blink effects, it remains unexplored whether the dynamics of temporal selective attention vary with expertise (...) and objects types in the auditory modality. Methods. Using the auditory version of the attentional blink paradigm, the present study investigates whether certain auditory objects relating to musical and perceptual expertise could have an impact on the transient costs of selective attention. In this study, expert cellists and novice participants were asked to first identify a target sound, and then to detect instrumental timbres of cello or organ, or human voice as a second target in a rapid auditory stream. Results. The results showed moderate evidence against the attentional blink effect for voices independent of participants’ musical expertise. Experts outperformed novices in their overall accuracy levels of target identification and detection, reflecting a clear benefit of musical expertise. Importanly, the musicianship advantage disappeared when the human voices served as the second target in the stream. Discussion. The results are discussed in terms of stimulus salience, the advantage of voice processing, as well as perceptual and musical expertise in relation to attention and working memory performances. (shrink)

The ability to distinguish between subtle differences among emotions of similar valence is labelled emotion differentiation (ED). Previous research has demonstrated that people high in ED are less likely to use disengagement regulation strategies (i.e. avoidance/distraction) during negative affective states.The present eye-tracking study examined associations between ED and visual attention/avoidance of affective stimuli. A total of 160 participants viewed emotional video clips (positive/ negative), which were concurrently presented with a non-affective distractor image. After each video, participants verbally described their (...) experienced emotions with adjectives in an open-response format. Moreover, they completed an ED questionnaire.The computed ED specificity index for the negative videos (the number of specific adjectives divided by all adjectives used) was positively associated with the scores on the ED questionnaire and visual revisits for the negative videos (how many times the participants gazed back and forth between video and distractor). This viewing style might reflect more active exploratory behaviour directed toward acquiring information about the negative stimulus and its context. The ED measures were not associated with the gaze behaviour for positive videos. (shrink)

Two experiments are described that investigate the effects of attention in moderating evaluative conditioning (EC) effects in a picture‐picture paradigm in which previously discovered experimental artifacts (e.g., Field & Davey, 1999 Field, AP, and Davey, GCL, (1999). Reevaluating evaluative conditioning: A nonassociative explanation of conditioning effects in the visual evaluative conditioning paradigm, Journal of Experimental Psychology. Animal Behavior Processes 25 ((1999)), pp. 211–224.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]) were overcome by counterbalancing conditioned stimuli (CSs) and unconditioned (...) class='Hi'>stimuli (USs) across participants. Conditioned responses for individuals who had attention enhanced were compared against a control group and groups for whom attention was impeded using a distracter task. In a second experiment the effects of attention were dissociated from those of contingency awareness by using backward‐masked US presentations. The results of these experiments indicate that although associative EC effects may not be disrupted by a lack of contingency awareness, attention is an important factor in establishing conditioning. These results shed some light onto the possible boundary conditions that could explain past inconsistencies in obtaining EC effects in the visual paradigm. (shrink)

Psychotherapy with the use of psychedelic substances, including psilocybin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), ketamine, and 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), has demonstrated promise in treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, addiction, and treatment-resistant depression. Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy (PP) represents a unique psychopharmacological model that leverages the profound effects of the psychedelic experience. That experience is characterized by strong dependency on two key factors: participant mindset and the therapeutic environment. As such, therapeutic models that utilize psychedelics reflect the need for careful design that promotes (...) an open, flexible, trusting mindset and a supportive setting. To meet this need, the PP model is increasingly supplemented by auxiliary methods, including meditation, relaxation, visualization or spiritual practices. We suggest virtual reality (VR) as a full-spectrum tool able to capitalize on and catalyze the innately therapeutic aspects of the psychedelic experience, such as detachment from familiar reality, alteration of self-experience, augmentation of sensory perception and induction of mystical-type experiences. This is facilitated by VR’s evidenced capacity to: aid relaxation and reduce anxiety; buffer from external stimuli; promote a mindful presence; train the mind to achieve altered states of consciousness (ASC); evoke mystical states; enhance therapeutic alliance and encourage self-efficacy. While these unique VR features appear promising, VR’s potential role in PP remains speculative due to lack of empirical evidence on the combined use of VR and PP. Given the increased commercial interest in this synergy there is an urgent need to evaluate this approach. We suggest specific VR models and their role within PP protocols to inspire future direction in scientific research, and provide a list of potential disadvantages, side effects and limitations that need to be carefully considered. These include sensory overstimulation, cyber-sickness, triggering memories of past traumatic events as well as distracting from the inner experience or strongly influencing its contents. A balanced, evidence-based approach may provide continuity across all phases of treatment, support transition into and out of an ASC, deepen acute ASC experiences including mystical states and enrich the psychotherapeutic process of integration. We conclude that the potential application of VR in modulating psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy demands further exploration and an evidence-based approach to both design and implementation. (shrink)

Sustained attention, a key cognitive skill that improves during childhood and adolescence, tends to be worse in some emotional and behavioural disorders. Sustained attention is typically studied in non-affective task contexts; here, we used a novel task to index performance in affective versus neutral contexts across adolescence (N = 465; ages 11–18). We asked whether: (i) performance would be worse in negative versus neutral task contexts; (ii) performance would improve with age; (iii) affective interference would be greater in younger adolescents; (...) (iv) adolescents at risk for depression and higher in anxiety would show overall worse performance; and (v) would show differential performance in negative contexts. Results indicated that participants performed more poorly in negative contexts and showed age-related performance improvements. Those at risk of depression performed more poorly than those at lower risk. However, there was no difference between groups as a result of affective context. For anxiety there was no difference in performance as a function of severity. However, those with higher anxiety showed less variance in their reaction times to negative stimuli than those with lower anxiety. One interpretation is that moderate levels of emotional arousal associated with anxiety make individuals less susceptible to the distracting effects of negative stimuli. (shrink)

The mere exposure effect is the increase in positive affect that results from the repeated exposure to previously novel stimuli. We sought to determine if judgments other than affective preference could reliably produce a mere exposure effect for two-dimensional random shapes. In two experiments, we found that brighter and darker judgments did not differentiate target from distracter shapes, liking judgments led to target selection greater than chance, and disliking judgments led to distracter selection greater than chance. These results for (...) brighter, darker, and liking judgments were obtained regardless of whether shape recognition was greater (Experiment 1) or not greater (Experiment 2) than chance. Effects of prior exposure to novel shapes were reliably observed only for affective judgment tasks. These results are inconsistent with general predictions made by the nonspecific activation hypothesis, but not the affective primacy or perceptual fluency hypotheses which were discussed in terms of cognitive neuroscience research. (shrink)

In this article I analyse object labelling image macro internet memes as multimodal metaphors, taking the Distracted Boyfriend meme as a case study. Object labelling memes are multimodal texts in which users add labels to a stock photograph to convey messages that are often humorous or satirical in nature. Using the relevance-theoretic account of metaphor, I argue that object labelling memes are multimodal metaphors which are interpreted using the same processes as verbal metaphors. The labelling of the image guides the (...) viewer in the construction of ad hoc concepts, and it is these ad hoc concepts that contribute to the overall meaning that is communicated. The analysis in this article is rooted in the relevance-theoretic claim that pragmatic interpretive processes are triggered by all and any ostensive acts of communication. I also draw heavily on Deirdre Wilson’s work on lexical pragmatics to show how this plays out in the case of a multimodal digital text. Memes, like verbal metaphors, do not require a special theory or framework. They can be understood as ostensive stimuli which trigger the search for an optimally relevant interpretation. (shrink)

Previous research has found that people choose to reappraise low intensity images more often than high intensity images. However, this research does not account for image ambivalence, which is presence of both positive and negative cues in a stimulus. The purpose of this research was to determine differences in ambivalence in high intensity and low intensity images used in previous research (experiments 1–2), and if ambivalence played a role in emotion regulation choice in addition to intensity (experiments 3–4). Experiments 1 (...) and 2 found that the low intensity images were more ambivalent than the high intensity images. Experiment 2 further found a positive relationship between ambivalence of an image and reappraisal affordances. Experiments 3 and 4 found that people chose to reappraise ambivalent images more often than non-ambivalent images, and they also chose to reappraise low intensity images more often than high intensity images. These experiments support the idea that ambivalence is a factor in emotion regulation choice. Future research should consider the impact ambivalent stimuli have on emotion regulation, including the potential for leveraging ambivalent stimuli to improve one’s emotion regulation ability. (shrink)

Studies showing human behavior influenced by subliminal stimuli mainly focus on implicit processing per se, and little is known about its interaction with explicit processing. We examined this by using the Simon effect, wherein a task-irrelevant spatial distracter interferes with lateralized response. Lo and Yeh found that the visual Simon effect, although it occurred when participants were aware of the visual distracters, did not occur with subliminal visual distracters. We used the same paradigm and examined whether subliminal and supra-threshold (...) stimuli are processed independently by adding a supra-threshold auditory distracter to ascertain whether it would interact with the subliminal visual distracter. Results showed auditory Simon effect, but there was still no visual Simon effect, indicating that supra-threshold and subliminal stimuli are processed separately in independent streams. In contrast to the traditional view that implicit processing precedes explicit processing, our results suggest that they operate independently in a parallel fashion. (shrink)

We explore the ability to distinguish random from non-random events. Randomness is defined in terms of radioactive decay whereas non-randomness is quantified by excess repetitions (“repeat”) or alternations (“switch”) between successive bits. In the first four experiments no mention was made of randomness, probability, or related concepts in task instructions. We found superior performance in distinguishing random stimuli from repeat stimuli compared to switch stimuli. The last three experiments explicitly evoked the concept of randomness, thus allowing comparison (...) of perceptual and conceptual performance. The ability to identify random events from switch distracters was inferior to the ability to discriminate random from switch stimuli. In contrast, for repeat stimuli the concept of randomness appears to roughly coincide with perceptual discriminability. Finally, the ability to identify or produce stimuli as random did not co-vary with the ability to discriminate random from non-random stimuli. (shrink)

Using social information is not indiscriminate and being able to choose what to copy and from whom to copy is critical. Dogs are able to learn socially, to recognize, and respond to dog as well as human emotional expressions, and to make reputation-like inferences based on how people behave towards their owner. Yet, the mechanisms dogs use for obtaining and utilizing social information are still to be fully understood, especially concerning whether emotional cues influence dogs’ social learning. Therefore, our main (...) aim was to test the hypothesis that an emotionally charged interaction with the demonstrator of a “V” detour task prior to testing would affect subjects’ performance, by: changing the value of the information provided by the demonstrator or changing the valence of the learning environment. Our experimental design consisted of three phases: pre-test ; emotional display ; test. Only dogs that failed in pre-test were considered for analysis. We analyzed four dependent variables: success, time to solve the task, latency to reach the fence and matching the side of demonstration. For each, we used four models to investigate the effect of demographic factors; experimental design factors ; behavior of the dog; and side chosen and matching. All models took into account all trials and the first trials only. Our findings corroborate previous studies of social learning, but present no evidence to sustain our hypothesis. We discuss the possibility of our stimuli not being salient enough in a task that involves highly motivating food and relies on long and highly distracting interval between phases. Nevertheless, these results represent an important contribution to the study of dog behavior and social cognition and pave the way for further investigations. (shrink)

Can conscious awareness be ascertained from physiological responses alone? We evaluate a novel learning-based procedure permitting detection of conscious awareness without reliance on language comprehension or behavioural responses. The method exploits a situation whereby only consciously detected violations of an expectation alter skin conductance responses . Thirty participants listened to sequences of piano notes that, without their being told, predicted a pleasant fanfare or an aversive noise according to an abstract rule. Stimuli were presented without distraction , or while (...) distracted by a visual task to remove awareness of the rule . A test phase included occasional violations of the rule. Only participants attending the sounds reported awareness of violations and only they showed significantly greater SCR for noise occurring in violation, vs. accordance, with the rule. Our results establish theoretically significant dissociations between conscious and unconscious processing and furnish new opportunities for clinical assessment of residual consciousness in patient populations. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe social content of affective stimuli has been proposed as having an influence on cognitive processing and behaviour. This research was aimed, therefore, at studying whether automatic exogenous attention demanded by affective pictures was related to their social value. We hypothesised that affective social pictures would capture attention to a greater extent than non-social affective stimuli. For this purpose, we recorded event-related potentials in a sample of 24 participants engaged in a digit categorisation task. Distracters were affective pictures (...) varying in social content, in addition to affective valence and arousal, which appeared in the background during the task. Our data revealed that pictures depicting high social content captured greater automatic attention than other pictures, as reflected by the greater amplitude and shorter latency of anterior P2, and anterior and posterior N2 components of the ERPs. In addition, social content also provoked greater allocation of processing resour... (shrink)

We argue that the effects of evaluative learning may occur (a) without conscious perception of the affective stimuli, (b) without awareness of the stimulus contingencies, and (c) without any awareness that learning has occurred at all. Whether the three experiments reported in our target article provide conclusive evidence for either or any of these assertions is discussed in the commentaries of De Houwer and Field. We respond with the argument that when considered alongside other studies carried out over the (...) past few decades, our experiments provide compelling evidence for a theory that posits a dissociation between evaluative learning and contingency awareness. (shrink)

Summary Habituation mechanisms play a pivotal role in enabling organisms to filter out irrelevant stimuli and concentrate on essential ones. Through repeated exposure, the brain learns to disregard stimuli that are irrelevant, effectively ceasing to respond to potentially distracting input. Previous studies have demonstrated that the orienting response to visual distractors disrupting visual detection tasks habituates as tasks progress and distractors are encountered repeatedly, as their initial interference diminishes. Theoretical models posit that this reduction is contingent upon (...) the establishment of an internal representation of external stimuli. Moreover, further studies have indicated that habituation can be context- specific, suggesting that the mechanisms involved incorporate information about features of irrelevant stimuli that extend beyond their discrete characteristics. In this contribution, we further delved into the question of whether the context in which habituation occurs retains a general habituative capacity when a new, to-be-ignored stimulus is introduced. We discuss evidence indicating that the context in which habituation has already taken place facilitates the habituation process for a new stimulus. This suggests that it becomes easier to ignore new stimuli in contexts where we have already learned to disregard other stimuli, underscoring the intricate interplay between habituation, context, and attentional processes. (shrink)

Background and aimsExcessive pain during medical procedures is a worldwide medical problem. Most scald burns occur in children under 6, who are often undermedicated. Adjunctive Virtual Reality distraction has been shown to reduce pain in children aged 6–17, but little is known about VR analgesia in young children. This study tests whether desktop VR can reduce the just noticeable pressure pain of children aged 2–10.MethodsA within-subject repeated measures design was used. With treatment order randomized, each healthy volunteer pediatric participant underwent (...) brief cutaneous pressure stimuli under three conditions: no distraction, a verbal color naming task, and a large TV-based desktop VR distraction. A hand-held Wagner pressure pain stimulation device was used to generate just noticeable pain sensations. Participants indicated when a steadily increasing non-painful pressure stimulus first turned into a painful pressure sensation.ResultsA total of 40 healthy children participated. Compared to the no distraction condition, the 40 children showed significant VR analgesia, t = 9.83, p < 0.001, SD = 6.24. VR was also significantly more effective at reducing pain sensitivity vs. an auditory color naming task, t = 5.42, p < 0.001, SD = 5.94. The subset of children aged 2–5 showed significant reductions in pain during VR. Children under 6 showed greater sensitivity to pain during no distraction than children aged 6–10.ConclusionDuring no distraction, children under 6 years old were significantly more sensitive to pain than children aged 6–10. Virtual reality significantly reduced the “just noticeable” pressure pain sensitivity of children in both age groups. (shrink)

This study aimed to discover whether it is possible to transfer attachment vocalizations theory to the human-dog relationship. This study looked at whether people who identified as pet parents showed higher distractions when performing an attention-related task than non-pet parents people with dogs. Also used were the sounds of a baby crying, a neutral dog voice (sniffing), another potentially distracting sound, and silence. 23 people with dogs were examined. A modified version of the Bourdon-Wiersma test and the Lexington Attachment (...) to Pet Scale were used. The study found no significant statistical difference between the stimuli used and between the silence and the rest of the stimuli. Despite the lack of expected effects in the study, it is an important introduction to the subject of pet parenting. It also shows that the chosen way of measuring distraction with emotional stimuli may need to be more accurate. I also show possible future research directions. (shrink)

In educational hypermedia environments, students are often confronted with potential sources of distraction arising from additional information that, albeit interesting, is unrelated to their current task goal. The paper investigates the conditions under which distraction occurs and hampers performance. Based on theories of volitional action control it was hypothesized that interesting information, especially if related to a pending goal, would interfere with task performance only when working on easy, but not on difficult tasks. In Experiment 1, 66 students learned about (...) probability theory using worked examples and solved corresponding test problems, whose task difficulty was manipulated. As a second factor, the presence of interesting information unrelated to the primary task was varied. Results showed that students solved more easy than difficult probability problems correctly. However, the presence of interesting, but task-irrelevant information did not interfere with performance. In Experiment 2, 68 students again engaged in example-based learning and problem solving in the presence of task-irrelevant information. Problem-solving difficulty was varied as a first factor. Additionally, the presence of a pending goal related to the task-irrelevant information was manipulated. As expected, problem-solving performance declined when a pending goal was present during working on easy problems, whereas no interference was observed for difficult problems. Moreover, the presence of a pending goal reduced the time on task-relevant information and increased the time on task-irrelevant information while working on easy tasks. However, as revealed by mediation analyses these changes in overt information processing behavior did not explain the decline in problem-solving performance. As an alternative explanation it is suggested that goal conflicts resulting from pending goals claim cognitive resources, which are then no longer available for learning and problem solving. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that contemporary media technologies push individuals into collective action on an industrial scale, without them necessarily being aware of it. Yet what if the problem is not that we are all synchronized to the same affective networks and moments, but rather dispersed into countless different networks and moments? What if the effect of so-called social media is to calibrate the interactive spectacle so that we never fully feel the same way as other potential allies at the (...) same moment? While one person is fuming about economic injustice or climate change denial, another is giggling at a cute cat video, and, two hours late, vice versa. The nebulous indignation which constitutes the very fuel of true social change can be redirected safely around the network, avoiding any dangerous surges of radical activity In this short and provocative book Dominic Pettman examines the deliberate deployment of what he calls ‘asynchronous hypermodulation’, as a key strategy encoded into the contemporary media environment. By focusing on ‘we, the mediated’, this radical intervention challenges the narratives that portray the new media environment as a monolithic media apparatus, rendering us all into the same libidinal grey glue, subsequently channelled at will through the pleasure palace of the internet. The unprecedented power of the Internet requires us to rethink the potential for infinite distractions that accompany it. (shrink)

We report an experiment investigating the “special-process” theory of insight problem solving, which claims that insight arises from non-conscious, non-reportable processes that enable problem re-structuring. We predicted that reducing opportunities for speech-based processing during insight problem solving should permit special processes to function more effectively and gain conscious awareness, thereby facilitating insight. We distracted speech-based processing by using either articulatory suppression or irrelevant speech, with findings for these conditions supporting the predicted insight facilitation effect relative to silent working or thinking (...) aloud. The latter condition was included to investigate the currently contested effect of “verbal overshadowing” on insight, whereby thinking aloud is claimed to hinder the operation of special, non-reportable processes. Whilst verbal overshadowing was not evident in final solution rates, there was nevertheless support for verbal overshadowing up to and beyond.. (shrink)