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Over the years, research in neuroscience-driven marketing has progressively delved into the conscious and subconscious behaviors of consumers. Existing Electroencephalography (EEG)-based studies related to consumer preferences toward products are not comprehensive. Due to non-stationarity issues of EEG, a significant variance is observed in inter-trial and inter-session EEG signals of a subject, which leads to challenges in building a universal consumer preference model across diverse subjects, sessions, and tasks. Transfer learning mitigates this challenge by utilizing data or knowledge from similar subjects, sessions, or tasks to improve the learning process for a new subject, session, or task, thereby enhancing overall model performance. Moreover, high-dimensional EEG features often lead to poor classification results. Therefore, selecting meaningful or refined features is of utmost importance for classification. Therefore, we propose a robust EEG-based neuromarketing framework combining deep transfer learning, spatial attention model, and deep neural networks. The proposed framework predicts the consumer choices (in terms of “likes” and “dislikes”) for e-commerce products. Initially, the knowledge distillation is performed from the pre-trained network to the proposed model, and the model is trained on the connectivity features of EEG. Next, the attention-based features are extracted from high-level connectivity features using the spatial attention model (Convolutional Block Attention Module: CBAM). CBAM extracts the attention feature maps along channel and spatial dimensions for adaptive feature refinement. The refined features improve the classification accuracy. Finally, the attention-based features are passed to the 2D CNN-based deep learning model to evaluate consumer choices. The proposed model achieves 95.60% classification accuracy with the experimental dataset. The proposed model achieves a significant improvement of 2.60% over the existing neuromarketin, Validerad;2024;Nivå 2;2024-03-18 (hanlid);Full text license: CC BY-NC-ND

Healthy individuals typically show more attention to the left than to the right (known as pseudoneglect), and to the upper than to the lower visual field (known as altitudinal pseudoneglect). These biases are thought to reflect asymmetries in neural processes. Attention biases have been used to investigate how these neural asymmetries change with age. However, inconsistent results have been reported regarding the presence and direction of age-related effects on horizontal and vertical attention biases. The observed inconsistencies may be due to insensitive measures and small sample sizes, that usually only feature extreme age groups. We investigated whether spatial attention biases, as indexed by gaze position during free viewing of a single image, are influenced by age. We analysed free-viewing data from 4,243 participants aged 5–65 years and found that attention biases shifted to the right and superior directions with increasing age. These findings are consistent with the idea of developing cerebral asymmetries with age and support the hypothesis of the origin of the leftward bias. Age modulations were found only for the first seven fixations, corresponding to the time window in which an absolute leftward bias in free viewing was previously observed. We interpret this as evidence that the horizontal and vertical attention biases are primarily present when orienting attention to a novel stimulus – and that age modulations of attention orienting are not global modulations of spatial attention. Taken together, our results suggest that attention orienting may be modulated by age and that cortical asymmetries may change with age.

People have a leftward bias when making visuospatial judgements about horizontally arranged stimuli (“pseudoneglect”), and a superior bias when making visuospatial judgements about vertically arranged stimuli. The leftward visuospatial bias in physical space seems to extend to the mental representation of space. However, whether any bias exists in mental representation of vertical space is unknown. We investigated whether people show a visuospatial bias in the mental representation of vertical space, and if any bias in mental representations of horizontal and vertical space related to the extent of bias in physical space. Participants (n=171) were presented with three numbers and asked which interval was smaller/larger (counterbalanced): the interval between the first and middle, or middle and last number. Participants were instructed to either think of the numbers as houses on a street or as floors of a building, or were given no imagery instructions. Participants in the houses on a street condition showed a leftward bias, but there was no superior bias in the floors of a building condition. In contrast, we replicated previous findings of leftward and superior bias on greyscales tasks. Our findings reinforce previous evidence that numbers are represented horizontally and ascending left to right by default.

Purpose: Alterations in spatial attention have been reported in people with chronic pain and may be relevant to understanding its cortical mechanisms and developing novel treatments. There is conflicting evidence as to whether people with Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) have reduced visuospatial attention to their affected limb and/or its surrounding space, with some evidence that these deficits may be greater in personal (bodily) space. We aimed to test the competing hypotheses of whether the visuospatial attentional bias is specific to the personal space of the affected limb or generalizes to the personal space of other parts of the affected side of the body. Patients and Methods: Using visual Temporal Order Judgement tasks, we measured spatial attention in the personal space of the hands and feet of patients with upper (n=14) or lower (n=14) limb CRPS and pain-free controls (n=17). Participants judged the order of two light flashes presented at different temporal offsets on each of their hands or feet. Slower processing of the flash on one side relative to the other reflects reduced attention to that side of space. Results: Controls prioritized stimuli on the non-dominant (left) relative to dominant side, consistent with the well-documented normal leftward bias of attention (ie “pseudoneglect”). Regardless of the location (upper or lower limb) of the pain or visual stimuli, people with CRPS showed no such asymmetry, representing reduced attention to the affected side (compared to the greater attention of controls to their non-dominant side). More severe CRPS symptoms were associated with a greater tendency to deprioritize stimuli on the affected side. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that relative visuospatial bias in CRPS is generalized to the personal space of the affected side of the body, rather than being specific to the personal space of the CRPS-affected limb.

2023 Acuerdos transformativos CRUE Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Grant/Award Number: MU 972/24-1, In recent years, steady‐state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) became an increasingly valuable tool to investigate neural dynamics of competitive attentional interactions and brain–computer interfaces. This is due to their good signal‐to‐noise ratio, allowing for single‐trial analysis, and their ongoing oscillating nature that enables to analyze temporal dynamics of facilitation and suppression. Given the popularity of SSVEPs, it is surprising that only a few studies looked at the cortical sources of these responses. This is in particular the case when searching for studies that assessed the cortical sources of attentional SSVEP amplitude modulations. To address this issue, we used a typical spatial attention task and recorded neuromagnetic fields (MEG) while presenting frequency‐tagged stimuli in the left and right visual fields, respectively. Importantly, we controlled for attentional deployment in a baseline period before the shifting cue. Subjects either attended to a central fixation cross or to two peripheral stimuli simultaneously. Results clearly showed that signal sources and attention effects were restricted to the early visual cortex: V1, V2, hMT+, precuneus, occipital‐parietal, and inferior‐temporal cortex. When subjects attended to central fixation first, shifting attention to one of the peripheral stimuli resulted in a significant activation increase for the to‐be‐attended stimulus with no activation decrease for the to‐be‐ignored stimulus in hMT+ and inferio‐temporal cortex, but significant SSVEF decreases from V1 to occipito‐parietal cortex. When attention was first deployed to both rings, shifting attention away from one ring basically resulted in a significant activation decrease in all areas for the then‐to‐be‐ignored stimulus., Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Depto. de Psicología Experimental, Procesos Cognitivos y Logopedia, Fac. de Psicología, TRUE, pub, APC financiada por la UCM

Accurate air quality forecasting is crucial for public health, environmental monitoring and protection, and urban planning. However, existing methods fail to effectively utilize multi-scale information, both spatially and temporally. There is a lack of integration between individual monitoring stations and city-wide scales. Temporally, the periodic nature of air quality variations is often overlooked or inadequately considered. To overcome these limitations, we conduct a thorough analysis of the data and tasks, integrating spatio-temporal multi-scale domain knowledge. We present a novel Multi-spatial Multi-temporal air quality forecasting method based on Graph Convolutional Networks and Gated Recurrent Units (M2G2), bridging the gap in air quality forecasting across spatial and temporal scales. The proposed framework consists of two modules: Multi-scale Spatial GCN (MS-GCN) for spatial information fusion and Multi-scale Temporal GRU (MT-GRU) for temporal information integration. In the spatial dimension, the MS-GCN module employs a bidirectional learnable structure and a residual structure, enabling comprehensive information exchange between individual monitoring stations and the city-scale graph. Regarding the temporal dimension, the MT-GRU module adaptively combines information from different temporal scales through parallel hidden states. Leveraging meteorological indicators and four air quality indicators, we present comprehensive comparative analyses and ablation experiments, showcasing the higher accuracy of M2G2 in comparison to nine currently available advanced approaches across all aspects. The improvements of M2G2 over the second-best method on RMSE of 72-h future predictions are as follows: PM2.5: 6%∼10%; PM10: 5%∼7%; NO2: 5%∼16%; O3: 6%∼9%. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of each module of M2G2 by ablation study. We conduct a sensitivity analysis of air quality and meteorological data, finding that the introduction of O3 adversely impacts t

Available online 3 June 2022, Video games play a major role in the everyday life of children, teenagers, and adults. Several studies show that action video games (AVGs) improve visual attentional efficiency. AVGs also appear to improve reading speed and phonological skills in children with developmental dyslexia. These results have been linked to the intrinsic characteristics of AVGs, in which fast disengagement of multisensory attention allows for efficient extraction of relevant dynamic information, a skill that is crucially also involved in phonological and reading skills. We tested the hypothesis that AVG players demonstrate faster auditory attention disengagement in an auditory spatial cuing task, as well as better phonological and reading performance than non-players. We found that AVG players were faster in spatial localization of auditory targets and showed enhanced attentional disengagement as indexed by a smaller cuing effect. AVG players also showed better phonological decoding and working memory skills. Moreover, the beneficial effects of AVGs, as measured by faster attentional disengagement, were linked to better phonological and reading skills in adult AVG players. We suggest that a more efficient attentional disengagement - controlled by the posterior parietal cortex - induces enhanced multisensory processing in AVG players.

Visuospatial neglect is a frequent and disabling disorder, mostly after stroke, that presents in impaired awareness to stimuli on one side of space. Neglect causes disability and functional dependence, even long after the injury. Improving measurements of the core attentional deficit might hold the key for better understanding of the condition and development of treatment. We present a rapid, pupillometry-based method that assesses automatic biases in (covert) attention, without requiring behavioral responses. We exploit the phenomenon that pupil light responses scale with the degree of covert attention to stimuli, and thereby reveal what draws (no) attention. Participants with left-sided neglect after right-sided lesions following stroke (n = 5), participants with hemianopia/quadrantanopia following stroke (n = 11), and controls (n = 22) were presented with two vertical bars, one of which was white and one of which was black, while fixating the center. We varied which brightness was left and right, respectively across trials. In line with the hypotheses, participants with neglect demonstrated biased pupil light responses to the brightness on the right side. Participants with hemianopia showed similar biases to intact parts of the visual field, whilst controls exhibited no bias. Together, this demonstrates that the pupil light response can reveal not only visual, but also attentional deficits. Strikingly, our pupillometry-based bias estimates were not in agreement with neuropsychological paper-and-pencil assessments conducted on the same day, but were with those administered in an earlier phase post-stroke. Potentially, we pick up on persistent biases in the covert attentional system that participants increasingly compensate for in classical neuropsychological tasks and everyday life. The here proposed method may not only find clinical application, but also advance theory and aid the development of successful restoration therapies by introducing a precise, longit

Previous research suggests that attention is drawn by self-related information. Three online experiments were conducted to investigate whether self-related stimuli alter visuospatial perceptual judgments. In a matching task, associations were learned between labels ('Yourself'/friend/stranger's name) paired with cues. Cues were coloured outlines (Experiment 1, N = 135), geometric shapes (Experiment 2, N = 102), or coloured gradients (Experiment 3, N = 110). Visuospatial perception bias was measured with a greyscales task. Cues were presented prior to, and/or alongside greyscales. We hypothesized there would be a bias towards the self-related cue. In all experiments, we found a self-related bias in the matching task. Furthermore, there was an overall leftward visuospatial perceptual bias (pseudoneglect). However, we found anecdotal to moderate evidence for the absence of an effect of self-related cues on visuospatial perception judgments. Although self-related stimuli influence how our attention is oriented to stimuli, attention mechanisms that influence perceptual judgements are seemingly not affected by a self-bias.

Image captioning is a significant field across computer vision and natural language processing. We propose and present AIC-AB NET, a novel Attribute-Information-Combined Attention-Based Network that combines spatial attention architecture and text attributes in an encoder-decoder. For caption generation, adaptive spatial attention determines which image region best represents the image and whether to attend to the visual features or the visual sentinel. Text attribute information is synchronously fed into the decoder to help image recognition and reduce uncertainty. We have tested and evaluated our AICAB NET on the MS COCO dataset and a new proposed Fashion dataset. The Fashion dataset is employed as a benchmark of single-object images. The results show the superior performance of the proposed model compared to the state-of-the-art baseline and ablated models on both the images from MSCOCO and our single-object images. Our AIC-AB NET outperforms the baseline adaptive attention network by 0.017 (CIDEr score) on the MS COCO dataset and 0.095 (CIDEr score) on the Fashion dataset., QC 20230918

A left visual field (LVF) bias in perceptual judgments, response speed, and discrimination accuracy has been reported in humans. Cognitive factors, such as visual spatial attention, are known to modulate or even eliminate this bias. We investigated this problem by recording pupillometry together with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a cued visual spatial attention task. We observed that (i) the pupil was significantly more dilated following attend-right than attend-left cues, (ii) the task performance (e.g. reaction time [RT]) did not differ between attend-left and attend-right trials, and (iii) the difference in cue-related pupil dilation between attend-left and attend-right trials was inversely related to the corresponding difference in RT. Neuroscientically, correlating the difference in cue-related pupil dilation with the corresponding cue-related fMRI difference yielded activations primarily in the right hemisphere, including the right intraparietal sulcus and the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. These results suggest that (i) there is an asymmetry in visual spatial attention control, with the rightward attention control being more effortful than the leftward attention control, (ii) this asymmetry underlies the reduction or the elimination of the LVF bias, and (iii) the components of the attentional control networks in the right hemisphere are likely part of the neural substrate of the observed asymmetry in attentional control.

Microsaccades that occur during periods of fixation are modulated by various cognitive processes and have an impact on visual processing. A network of brain areas is involved in microsaccade generation, including the superior colliculus and frontal eye field (FEF) which are involved in modulating microsaccade rate and direction after the appearance of a visual cue (referred to as microsaccade cueing modulation). Although the neural mechanisms underlying microsaccade cueing modulations have been demonstrated in monkeys, limited research has investigated a causal role of these areas in humans. By applying continuous theta-burst transcranial magnetic stimulation (cTBS) over the right FEF and vertex, we investigated the role of human FEF in modulating microsaccade responses after the appearance of a visual target in a visual- and memory-delay saccade task. After target appearance, microsaccade rate was initially suppressed but then increased in both cTBS conditions. More importantly, in the visual-delay task, microsaccades after target appearance were directed to the ipsilateral side more often with FEF, compared to vertex stimulation. Moreover, microsaccades were directed towards the target location, then to the opposite location of the target in both tasks, with larger effects in the visual-, compared to, memory-delay task. This microsaccade direction modulation was delayed after FEF stimulation in the memory-delay task. Overall, some microsaccade cueing modulations were moderately disrupted after FEF cTBS, suggesting a causal role for involvement of the human FEF in microsaccade generation after presentation of salient stimuli, Revisión por pares, ODS 3: Salud y bienestar, ODS 9: Industria, innovación e infraestructura, ODS 12: Producción y consumo responsables

Artificial Intelligence (AI) based on knowledge graphs has been invested in realizing human intelligence like thinking, learning, and logical reasoning. It is a great promise to make AI-based systems not only intelligent but also knowledgeable. In this paper, we investigate knowledge graph based visual semantic navigation using deep reinforcement learning, where an agent reasons actions against targets specified by text words in indoor scenes. The agent perceives its surroundings through egocentric RGB views and learns via trial-and-error. The fundamental problem of visual navigation is efficient learning across different targets and scenes. To obtain an empirical model, we propose a spatial attention model with knowledge graphs, DGVN, which combines both semantic information about observed objects and spatial information about their locations. Our spatial attention model is constructed based on interactions between a 3D global graph and local graphs. The two graphs we adopted encode the spatial relationships between objects and are expected to guide policy search effectively. With the knowledge graph and its robust feature representation using graph convolutional networks, we demonstrate that our agent is able to infer a more plausible attention mechanism for decision-making. Under several experimental metrics, our attention model is shown to achieve superior navigation performance in the AI2-THOR environment.

Spatial attention is generally slightly biased leftward (“pseudoneglect”), a phenomenon typically assessed with paper-and-pencil tasks, limited by the requirement of explicit responses and the inability to assess on a subsecond timescale. Pseudoneglect is often stable within experiments, but differs vastly between investigations and is sometimes directed to the left, sometimes to the right. To date, no exhaustive explanation to this phenomenon has been provided. Here, we objectively assessed lateralized attention over time, exploiting the phenomenon that changes in the pupil reflect the allocation of attention in space. Pupil sizes of 41 healthy participants fixating the center were influenced stronger by the differential background luminance of the left side compared to the right side of the visual display. These differences were mainly driven by visual information in the periphery. Differences in pupil sizes positively related with greyscales scores. Time-based analyses within trials show strongest effects early on. With increasing trial number (not time), the initial leftward bias shifted central in pupillometry-based and greyscales measures. This suggests that the orienting response determines the degree of attention bias. In our amplification hypothesis we pose that the quality of pseudoneglect (i.e., the direction) is determined by higher order factors such as hemispheric imbalances, whereas the quantity (i.e., the degree) is determined by the orienting network. This account might explain numerous—previously thought opposing—findings. We here show how pupil light responses reveal pseudoneglect, in a next step, this might allow clinical diagnosis of hemispatial neglect.

One of the fundamental factors maintaining social anxiety is biased attention toward threatening facial expressions. Typically, this bias has been conceptualized as driven by an overactive bottom-up attentional system; however, this potentially overlooks the role of top-down attention in being able to modulate this bottom-up bias. Here, the role of top-down mechanisms in directing attention toward emotional faces was assessed with a modified dot-probe task, in which participants were given a top-down cue ("happy" or "angry") to attend to a happy or angry face on each trial, and the cued face was either presented with a face of the other emotion (angry, happy) or a neutral face. This study found that social anxiety was not associated with differences in shifting attention toward cued angry faces. However, participants with higher levels of social anxiety were selectively impaired in attentional shifting toward a cued happy face when it was paired with an angry face, but not when paired with a neutral face. The results indicate that top-down attention can be used to orient attention to emotional faces, but that higher levels of social anxiety are associated with selective deficits in top-down control of attention in the presence of threat.

Available online 3 June 2022, Video games play a major role in the everyday life of children, teenagers, and adults. Several studies show that action video games (AVGs) improve visual attentional efficiency. AVGs also appear to improve reading speed and phonological skills in children with developmental dyslexia. These results have been linked to the intrinsic characteristics of AVGs, in which fast disengagement of multisensory attention allows for efficient extraction of relevant dynamic information, a skill that is crucially also involved in phonological and reading skills. We tested the hypothesis that AVG players demonstrate faster auditory attention disengagement in an auditory spatial cuing task, as well as better phonological and reading performance than non-players. We found that AVG players were faster in spatial localization of auditory targets and showed enhanced attentional disengagement as indexed by a smaller cuing effect. AVG players also showed better phonological decoding and working memory skills. Moreover, the beneficial effects of AVGs, as measured by faster attentional disengagement, were linked to better phonological and reading skills in adult AVG players. We suggest that a more efficient attentional disengagement - controlled by the posterior parietal cortex - induces enhanced multisensory processing in AVG players.

The C1 event-related potential (ERP) captures the earliest stage of feedforward processing in the primary visual cortex (V1). An ongoing debate is whether top-down selective attention can modulate the C1. One side of the debate pointed out that null findings appear to outnumber positive findings; thus, selective attention does not seem to influence the C1. However, this suggestion is not based on a valid approach to summarizing evidence across studies. Therefore, we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis investigating the effects of selective attention on the C1, involving 47 experiments and 794 subjects in total. Despite heterogeneity across studies, results suggested that attention has a moderate effect on the C1 (Cohen's $$ dz= 0.33, p < .0001); that is, C1 amplitude is larger for visual stimuli that are attended than unattended. These results suggest that C1 is affected by top-down selective attention.

The pupil light response is more than a pure reflexive mechanism that reacts to the amount of light entering the eye. The pupil size may also react to the luminance of objects lying in the visual periphery, revealing the locus of covert attention. In the present study, we took advantage of this response to study the spatial coding of abstract concepts with no physical counterpart: numbers. The participants’ gaze was maintained fixed in the middle of a screen whose left and right parts were dark or bright, and variations in pupil size were recorded during an auditory number comparison task. The results showed that small numbers accentuated pupil dilation when the darker part of the screen was on the left, while large numbers accentuated pupil dilation when the darker part of the screen was on the right. This finding provides direct evidence for covert attention shifts on a left-to-right oriented mental spatial representation of numbers. From a more general perspective, it shows that the pupillary response to light is subject to modulation from spatial attention mechanisms operating on mental contents.

Background and aims Hemineglect is an attentional disorder characterized by spatial and non-spatial (inhibition) attention deficits. Currently, there is no systematic evaluation of both attention components in clinical tests. Our aim was to create an innovative integrative measure combining the assessment of spatial and non-spatial attention. using a virtual reality serious game based on the visual search paradigm of Treisman (1980) Methods: We tested sixty healthy participants. They were asked to perform a target search task where the spatial target was a mole wearing a red helmet. In a feature search condition, the distractors were moles wearing blue helmets (with and without horns). In a conjunction search condition, the distractors were moles wearing blue helmet or a red helmet with horns. Responses were made with the dominant hand by hitting the target with a virtual hammer. Results: Reaction time results demonstrated a significant effect of search tasks and distractors (F(1,57) = 2175.6, p = 0.000; F (2,114) = 97.3, p = 0.000 respectively). Participants were significantly slower in the conjunction compared to feature search task, and they were slower when the number of distractors increased. A significant interaction between search tasks and distractors (F(2,114) = 106.4, p = 0.000) showed that reaction time only increased with distractor number for the conjunction search task. Conclusion: The innovative virtual reality serious game results replicate the Treisman paradigm, providing reliable measures of spatial and non-spatial attention. Future studies will test hemineglect patients in order to deepen the understanding of spatial and non-spatial components of hemineglect.

The topics of this dissertation center around the facilitation or hindering of performance on cluttered peripheral vision tasks by spatial attention. I focus primarily on two well-characterized visual phenomena: visual crowding and ensemble perception. Visual crowding is defined as the detrimental effect of clutter on object recognition in peripheral vision. Ensemble perception is defined as the ability to quickly extract a summary representation from a set of similar objects. These two phenomena seem to complement each other. For example, peripheral vision is very limited in identifying individual features and objects due to crowding, but it excels at quickly obtaining a summary-statistical representation due to ensemble perception. The roles of spatial attention in visual crowding and ensemble perception, and the commonalities between them on an individual and a group level, are not as well understood.In the first study, we investigated the effects of involuntary and voluntary attention on crowding. Visual spatial attention can be allocated in two distinct ways: one that is involuntarily captured by salient external stimuli, and one that is voluntarily directed to behaviorally relevant locations in the world. We used an anti-cueing paradigm to separately measure the effects of involuntary and voluntary spatial attention on the critical spacing of crowding, defined as the the minimum target/flanker spacing at which the target is correctly identified at a specified level of performance. We found that involuntary capture of attention led to faster response times (RTs) and smaller critical spacing, while voluntary allocation of attention led to faster RTs but no significant effect on critical spacing.In the second study, we expanded on the first study by comparing the effects of different sizes of a peripheral involuntary attention cue on performance of an orientation discrimination crowding task and performance of an ensemble mean orientation discrimination task. The

Falling down is a serious problem for health and has become one of the major etiologies of accidental death for the elderly living alone. In recent years, many efforts have been paid to fall recognition based on wearable sensors or standard vision sensors. However, the prior methods have the risk of privacy leaks, and almost all these methods are based on video clips, which cannot localize where the falls occurred in long videos. For these reasons, in this article, the bioinspired vision sensor-based falls temporal localization framework is proposed. The bioinspired vision sensors, such as dynamic and active-pixel vision sensor (DAVIS) camera applied in this work responds to pixels' brightness change, and each pixel works independently and asynchronously compared to the standard vision sensors. This property makes it have a very high dynamic range and privacy preserving. First, to better represent event data, compared with the typical constant temporal window mechanism, an adaptive temporal window conversion mechanism is developed. The temporal localization framework follows a proven proposal and classification paradigm. Second, for the high-efficient and recall proposal generation, different from the traditional sliding window scheme, the event temporal density as the actionness score is set and the 1D-watershed algorithm to generate proposals is applied. In addition, we combine the temporal and spatial attention mechanism with our feature extraction network to temporally model the falls. Finally, to evaluate the performance of our framework, 30 volunteers are recruited to join the simulated fall experiments. According to the results of experiments, our framework can realize precise falls temporal localization and achieve the state-of-the-art performance., QC 20230327

Unilateral spatial neglect is a neuropsychological syndrome commonly observed after stroke and defined by the inability to attend or respond to contralesional stimuli. Typically, symptoms are assessed using clinical tests that rely upon visual/perceptual abilities. However, neglect may affect high-level representations controlling attention in other modalities as well. Here we developed a novel manual exploration test using a touch screen computer to quantify spatial search behaviour without visual input. Twelve chronic stroke patients with left neglect and 27 patients without neglect (based on clinical tests) completed our task. Four of the 12 “neglect” patients exhibited clear signs of neglect on our task as compared to “non-neglect” patients and healthy controls, and six other patients (from both groups) also demonstrated signs of neglect compared to healthy controls only. While some patients made asymmetrical responses on only one task, generally, patients with the strongest neglect performed poorly on multiple tasks. This suggests that representations associated with different modalities may be affected separately, but that severe forms of neglect are more likely related to damage in a common underlying representation. Our manual exploration task is easy to administer and can be added to standard neglect screenings to better measure symptom severity.

Visual working memory (VWM) performance can be improved by retrospectively cueing an item. The validity of retro-cues has an impact on the mechanisms underlying the retro-cue effect, but how non-cued representations are handled under different retro-cue validity conditions is not yet clear. Here, we used electroencephalograms to investigate whether retro-cue validity can affect the fate of non-cued representations in VWM. The participants were required to perform a change-detection task using a retro-cue with 80% or 20% validity. Contralateral delay activity and the lateralized alpha power were used to assess memory storage and selective attention, respectively. The retro-cue could redirect selective attention to the cued item under both validity conditions; however, the participants maintained the non-cued representations under the low-validity condition but dropped them from VWM under the high-validity condition. These results suggest that the maintenance of non-cued representations in VWM is affected by the expectation of cue validity and may be partially strategically driven.

BackgroundComplex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) is a disorder of severe chronic pain in one or more limb(s). People with CRPS report unusual perceptions of the painful limb suggesting altered body representations, as well as difficulty attending to their affected limb (i.e. a 'neglect-like' attention bias). Altered body representations and attention in CRPS might be related, however, existing evidence is unclear. We hypothesized that if there were a body-related visuospatial attention bias in CRPS, then any attention bias away from the affected side should be larger for or limited to circumstances when the (impaired) body representation is involved in the task versus when this is not the case.MethodsWe included 40 people with CRPS, 40 with other limb pain conditions, and 40 pain-free controls. In half of the people with pain, their upper limb was affected, in the other half their lower limb. We administered computerized tasks of spatial attention, including free viewing of images, shape cancellation, temporal order judgement, and dot-probe. The degree to which different versions of each task involved body representation was manipulated by one or more of the following: (1) presenting stimuli nearer versus further away from the body, (2) using body related versus neutral stimuli, and (3) inducing mental rotation of body parts versus no mental rotation. In addition to perceptual judgements, eye movements were recorded as a sensitive index of spatial attention. Bayesian repeated measures analyses were performed.ResultsWe found no evidence for a (body-related) visuospatial attention bias in upper limb CRPS. Secondary analyses suggested the presence of a body-related visuospatial attention bias away from the affected side in some participants with lower limb CRPS.DiscussionOur results add to growing evidence that there might be no general visuospatial attention bias away from the affected side in CRPS.

In the recent advancements attention mechanism in deep learning had played a vital role in proving better results in tasks under computer vision. There exists multiple kinds of works under attention mechanism which includes under image classification, fine-grained visual recognition, image captioning, video captioning, object detection and recognition tasks. Global and local attention are the two attention based mechanisms which helps in interpreting the attentive partial. Considering this criteria, there exists channel and spatial attention where in channel attention considers the most attentive channel among the produced block of channels and spatial attention considers which region among the space needs to be focused on. We have proposed a streamlined attention block module which helps in enhancing the feature based learning with less number of additional layers i.e., a GAP layer followed by a linear layer with an incorporation of second order pooling(GSoP) after every layer in the utilized encoder. This mechanism has produced better range dependencies by the conducted experimentation. We have experimented our model on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and FGVC-Aircrafts datasets considering finegrained visual recognition. We were successful in achieving state-of-the-result for FGVC-Aircrafts with an accuracy of 97%.

The formation of ensemble codes is an efficient means through which the visual system represents vast arrays of information. This has led to the claim that ensemble representations are formed with minimal reliance on attentional resources. However, evidence is mixed regarding the effects of attention on ensemble processing, and researchers do not always make it clear how attention is being manipulated by their paradigm of choice. In this study, we examined the effects of Posner cueing—a well-established method of manipulating spatial attention—on the processing of a global motion stimulus, a naturalistic ensemble that requires the pooling of local motion signals. In Experiment 1, using a centrally presented, predictive attentional cue, we found no effect of spatial attention on global motion performance: Accuracy in invalid trials, where attention was misdirected by the cue, did not differ from accuracy in valid trials, where attention was directed to the location of the motion stimulus. In Experiment 2, we maximized the potential for our paradigm to reveal any attentional effects on global motion processing by using a threshold-based measure of performance; however, despite this change, there was again no evidence of an attentional effect on performance. Together, our results show that the processing of a global motion stimulus is unaffected when spatial attention is misdirected, and speak to the efficiency with which such ensemble stimuli are processed.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to compare binocular visual attention, visual processing speeds, and visuo-cognitive search ability in children with and without amblyopia and investigate the association of visual acuity and binocular function with these measures.Methods: Participants included 20 children with amblyopia (mean age = 9.0 ± 1.2 years; 15 anisometropic and 5 strabismic) and 20 children with normal vision development (9.5 ± 1.7 years). Vision assessment included visual acuity (monocular and binocular) and binocular function (Worth 4 Dot and Randot Preschool Stereotest). Visual attention and processing speeds were assessed using the three subtests of the Useful Field of View (UFOV; central processing, divided attention, and selective attention). Visuo-cognitive search was measured using static and dynamic presentations of the Trail Making Tests (TMTs), parts A and B, with increasing levels of executive function demand. All children performed these tasks binocularly.Results: Children with amblyopia demonstrated slower visual processing times on the UFOV (P = 0.04), and slower completion times on the TMT search tests (P = 0.014), compared to controls. TMT performance for children with amblyopia was also more negatively impacted with increasing executive function demands on the TMT part B, compared to controls (P = 0.005). Binocular visual acuity was associated with TMT (P = 0.006) and UFOV (P = 0.07) performance, but none of the other visual function measures were related to performance on these tasks.Conclusions: Children with amblyopia exhibit deficits in higher-order visual processing skills, including visual attention and visual search, particularly with increasing executive function demands. These findings have implications for understanding the impact of amblyopia on everyday function in children.

Unilateral spatial neglect (USN) is a common disorder after stroke. An application especially developed for stroke rehabilitation, the RehAtt Mixed Reality (MR) intends to train cognitive and motor functions that are affected by USN, by the means of interactive 3D games played in mixed reality, through smart glasses. The present study targets one specific cognitive function, namely spatial attention, and compares individual performances in one of the games (scenarios) to performances in a widely used test for detection of deficits in spatial attention – the Posner test. The hypothesis is that user reaction times in the RehAtt MR scenario correlates with user reaction times in the Posner test. Another test, including a questionnaire, to validate the usability of the RehAtt MR is also conducted. The sample for the usability test and questionnaire includes a total of 74 participants (47 women, 27 men, M = 39.6 years of age), of which 29 individuals (13 women, 16 men, M = 35 years of age) carried out the experimental part of the study. The results suggest that there is a significant correlation, r(27) = .411, p = .027, between reaction times in the Posner test and the scenario in the RehAtt MR, and that the product usability shows high quality. It is concluded that the results support that the scenario explored in the RehAtt MR trains spatial attention, although further research is needed for full validation., Unilateraltspatialt neglekt (USN) är en vanlig funktionsnedsättning efter stroke. En applikation som utvecklats speciellt för strokerehabilitering - RehAtt Mixed Reality (MR) - har som mål att träna kognitiva och motoriska funktioner som är påverkade av USN, med hjälp av 3D-spel som spelas i mixed reality, genom smarta glasögon. Den aktuella studien siktar in sig på en specifik kognitiv funktion – spatial uppmärksamhet – och jämför individuella prestationer i ett av spelen i RehAtt MR med prestationer i ett vanligt, ofta använt test för att upptäcka nedsättningar i spatial uppmärksamhet – Posner-testet. Hypotesen är att användares reaktionstider i spelet i RehAtt MR korrelerar med användares reaktionstider i Posner-testet. Ett annat test, inklusive en enkät, görs också, för att validera användbarheten i RehAtt MR. 74 deltagare (47 kvinnor, 27 män, M = 39.6 år) finns med i användbarhetstestet och enkäten, av vilka 29 individer (13 kvinnor, 16 män, M = 35 år) medverkade i den experimentella delen av studien. Resultaten indikerar att det är en signifikant korrelation, r(27) = .411, p = .027, mellan reaktionstiderna i Posner-testet och spelet i RehAtt MR, och att användbarheten hos produktenvisar hög kvalitet. Slutsatsen är att vad som hittats i den aktuella studien stödjer idéen att spelet i RehAtt MR tränar spatial uppmärksamhet, även om vidare studier krävs för en full validering.

Event-related potential (ERP) studies have suggested that Gestalt principles or grouping factors in a visual scene modulate attention deployment in early visual processing. The present study examined the effects of an extrinsic grouping factor, region commonality, on early ERP spatial attention. Effects of sex were also explored, since the processing of task-irrelvant objects may differ between the sexes. Twenty-four participants were required to discriminate one side of rapidly-presented bilateral letters, and attention effects were indexed by hemispheric lateralization accroding to attended visual fields. In results, an early P1 attention effect (70-110 ms) increased when the letters were surrounded by an object, compared to the control stimulus without a complete object, and this result was more prominent in women than in men. The present study demonstrates that visual object and sex differences play a novel role at very early cortical stages of processing in attention deployment to a task-irrelevant visual structure.

In the recent advancements attention mechanism in deep learning had played a vital role in proving better results in tasks under computer vision. There exists multiple kinds of works under attention mechanism which includes under image classification, fine-grained visual recognition, image captioning, video captioning, object detection and recognition tasks. Global and local attention are the two attention based mechanisms which helps in interpreting the attentive partial. Considering this criteria, there exists channel and spatial attention where in channel attention considers the most attentive channel among the produced block of channels and spatial attention considers which region among the space needs to be focused on. We have proposed a streamlined attention block module which helps in enhancing the feature based learning with less number of additional layers i.e., a GAP layer followed by a linear layer with an incorporation of second order pooling(GSoP) after every layer in the utilized encoder. This mechanism has produced better range dependencies by the conducted experimentation. We have experimented our model on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and FGVC-Aircrafts datasets considering finegrained visual recognition. We were successful in achieving state-of-the-result for FGVC-Aircrafts with an accuracy of 97%.

Different visual attributes effectively guide attention to specific items in visual working memory (VWM), ensuring that particularly important memory contents are readily available. Predictable temporal structures contribute to this efficient use of VWM: items are prospectively prioritized when they are expected to be needed. Occasionally, however, visual events only gain relevance through their timing after they have passed. We investigated retrospective attentional orienting based on temporal position by directly comparing it with orienting to spatial locations, which is typically considered the most powerful selection mechanism. In a colour-change-detection task, in which items appeared sequentially at different locations, symbolic number cues validly indicated the temporal or spatial location of the upcoming probe item either before encoding (precues; Experiment 1) or during maintenance (retrocues; Experiments 1–3). Temporal and spatial cues were physically identical and only differed in their mapping onto either temporal or spatial positions. Predictive cues yielded cueing benefits (i.e., higher accuracy and shorter reaction times) as compared with neutral cues, with larger benefits for precues than for retrocues. Importantly, spatial and temporal cueing benefits did not differ. Equivalent retrocueing benefits were also observed across different cue-probe intervals and irrespective of whether spatial or temporal position was used as retrieval cue, indicating that items were directly bound to temporal position and not prioritized via a space-based mechanism. These findings show that spatial and temporal properties can be used equally well to flexibly prioritise representations held in VWM and they highlight the functional similarities of space and time in VWM., Peer Reviewed

Machine learning, particularly deep learning (DL), has become a central and state-of-the-art method for several computer vision applications and remote sensing (RS) image processing. Researchers are continually trying to improve the performance of the DL methods by developing new architectural designs of the networks and/or developing new techniques, such as attention mechanisms. Since the attention mechanism has been proposed, regardless of its type, it has been increasingly used for diverse RS applications to improve the performances of the existing DL methods. However, these methods are scattered over different studies impeding the selection and application of the feasible approaches. This study provides an overview of the developed attention mechanisms and how to integrate them with different deep learning neural network architectures. In addition, it aims to investigate the effect of the attention mechanism on deep learning-based RS image processing. We identified and analyzed the advances in the corresponding attention mechanism-based deep learning (At-DL) methods. A systematic literature review was performed to identify the trends in publications, publishers, improved DL methods, data types used, attention types used, overall accuracies achieved using At-DL methods, and extracted the current research directions, weaknesses, and open problems to provide insights and recommendations for future studies. For this, five main research questions were formulated to extract the required data and information from the literature. Furthermore, we categorized the papers regarding the addressed RS image processing tasks (e.g., image classification, object detection, and change detection) and discussed the results within each group. In total, 270 papers were retrieved, of which 176 papers were selected according to the defined exclusion criteria for further analysis and detailed review. The results reveal that most of the papers reported an increase in overall accuracy when

At any moment in time, we have a single conscious visual experience representing a minute part of our visual world. As such, the visual input stimulating our retinae is in continuous competition for reaching conscious access. Many complex cognitive operations can only be applied to consciously accessible visual information, thereby raising the question whether humans have the ability to select which parts of their visual input rea- ches consciousness. Top-down attention allows humans to flexibly assign more processing resources to certain parts of our visual input, making it a likely mechanism to volitionally bias conscious access. Here, we investigated whether directing top-down attention to a particular location or feature accelerates conscious access of an initially suppressed visual stimulus at the attended location, or of the attended feature. We instructed participants to attend a spatial location (Experiment 1) or color (Experiment 2) for a speeded discrimination task, using a highly predictive cue. The predictive cues were highly effective in prompting sustained attention towards the cued location or color, as evidenced by faster discrimination of cued relative to uncued targets. We simultaneously measured detection times to interocularly suppressed probes that were either of the cued (i.e., attended) color/location or not, and were visually distinct from the targets used for the discrimination task. Despite our successful manipulation of top-down attention, suppressed probes were not released from suppression faster when they were presented at the attended location, or in the attended color. In contrast, when observers were cued to attend a color for locating targets of an ill-defined shape (inciting a broader attentional template), we did observe faster conscious access of probes in the attended color (Experiment 3). We discuss our findings in light of the specificity of attentional templates, and the inherent limitations that this poses for top-down a

To date, most of the research on spatial attention has focused on probing people's responses to stimuli presented in frontal space. That is, few researchers have attempted to assess what happens in the space that is currently unseen (essentially rear space). In a sense, then, 'out of sight' is, very much, 'out of mind'. In this review, we highlight what is presently known about the perception and processing of sensory stimuli (focusing on sounds) whose source is not currently visible. We briefly summarize known differences in the localizability of sounds presented from different locations in 3D space, and discuss the consequences for the crossmodal attentional and multisensory perceptual interactions taking place in various regions of space. The latest research now clearly shows that the kinds of crossmodal interactions that take place in rear space are very often different in kind from those that have been documented in frontal space. Developing a better understanding of how people respond to unseen sound sources in naturalistic environments by integrating findings emerging from multiple fields of research will likely lead to the design of better warning signals in the future. This review highlights the need for neuroscientists interested in spatial attention to spend more time researching what happens (in terms of the covert and overt crossmodal orienting of attention) in rear space.

Research indicates that humans orient attention toward facial expressions of emotion. Orienting to facial expressions has typically been conceptualised as due to bottom-up attentional capture. However, this overlooks the contributions of top-down attention and selection history. In the present study, across four experiments, these three attentional processes were differentiated using a variation of the dot-probe task, in which participants were cued to attend to a happy or angry face on each trial. Results show that attention toward facial expressions was not exclusively driven by bottom-up attentional capture; instead, participants could shift their attention toward both happy and angry faces in a top-down manner. This effect was not found when the faces were inverted, indicating that top-down attention relies on holistic processing of the face. In addition, no evidence of selection history was found (i.e., no improvement on repeated trials or blocks of trials in which the task was to orient to the same expression). Altogether, these results suggest that humans can use top-down attentional control to rapidly orient attention to emotional faces.

INTRODUCTION: Unilateral spatial neglect (USN) is a disorder of contralesional space awareness which often follows unilateral brain lesion. Since USN impairs awareness of contralesional space/body and often of concomitant motor disorders, its presence represents a negative prognostic factor of functional recovery. Thus, the disorder needs to be carefully diagnosed and treated. Here, we attempted to present a clear and concise picture of current insights in the comprehension and rehabilitation of USN. METHODS: We first provided an updated overview of USN clinical and neuroanatomical features and then highlighted recent progresses in the diagnosis and rehabilitation of the disease. In relation to USN rehabilitation, we conducted a MEDLINE literature research on three of the most promising interventions for USN rehabilitation: prismatic adaptation (PA), non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS), and virtual reality (VR). The identified studies were classified according to the strength of their methods. RESULTS: The last years have witnessed a relative decrement of interest in the study of neuropsychological disorders of spatial awareness in USN, but a relative increase in the study of potential interventions for its rehabilitation. Although optimal protocols still need to be defined, high-quality studies have demonstrated the efficacy of PA, TMS and tDCS interventions for the treatment of USN. In addition, preliminary investigations are suggesting the potentials of GVS and VR approaches for USN rehabilitation. CONCLUSION: Advancing neuropsychological and neuroscience tools to investigate USN pathophysiology is a necessary step to identify effective rehabilitation treatments and to foster our understanding of neurofunctional bases of spatial cognition in the healthy brain.

Visual attention can be allocated to different locations of the visual field at different times resulting in improved processing of stimuli presented then and there. Understanding how attention is deployed is important due to its involvement in how we perceive and interpret the external world. The orienting of attention, both voluntarily and involuntarily, in response to presentations of different stimuli is investigated in the current dissertation. Chapter 1 investigated how attention is oriented in response to feature cues predicting the timing and location of a subsequent target when observers have prior knowledge of where targets are likely to appear at different times. Results show that observers can flexibly incorporate the different types of predictors in service of their task. Chapters 2 and 3 investigated whether unconsciously processed objects can attract attention involuntarily when object categories are relevant to task goals. Chapter 2 uncovered an attentional cost when stimuli with unconsciously processed category membership information were presented than when control stimuli were presented. This behavioral cost was dependent upon the category information being related to the task performed. Chapter 3 further investigated the attentional cost and demonstrated attentional capture in a temporal paradigm – showing that attention was not reallocated following unconsciously processed category information. Together, the three studies expand our understanding of how attention is oriented, both voluntarily and involuntarily, based upon task set and different types of predictors. The dissertation stresses the importance of considering the context of the experimental task when interpreting results.

Research indicates that humans orient attention toward facial expressions of emotion. Orienting to facial expressions has typically been conceptualised as due to bottom-up attentional capture. However, this overlooks the contributions of top-down attention and selection history. In the present study, across four experiments, these three attentional processes were differentiated using a variation of the dot-probe task, in which participants were cued to attend to a happy or angry face on each trial. Results show that attention toward facial expressions was not exclusively driven by bottom-up attentional capture; instead, participants could shift their attention toward both happy and angry faces in a top-down manner. This effect was not found when the faces were inverted, indicating that top-down attention relies on holistic processing of the face. In addition, no evidence of selection history was found (i.e., no improvement on repeated trials or blocks of trials in which the task was to orient to the same expression). Altogether, these results suggest that humans can use top-down attentional control to rapidly orient attention to emotional faces.

We have recently demonstrated that when endogenous orienting of spatial attention is guided by central directional cues that reliably predict the position of lateral targets. Pupil Dilation (PDil) is higher as compared with directional cues that do not predict target position. These findings were interpreted as reflecting different levels of Locus Coeruleus-Noradrenergic activity during endogenous orienting. In contrast to this, we were not able to highlight reliable differences between PDil responses to infrequent invalid targets that are associated with predictive cues and frequent invalid targets that are associated with non-predictive ones. These null findings might have been due to the spurious influence of transitory changes in luminance at the moment of target presentation or to the short time window used for the analysis of target-related changes in PDil. Here, we re-explored cue- and target-related changes in PDil using cue and target stimuli that were kept isoluminant to their background and long lasting cue and target periods for data recording and analysis. We fully replicate our previous cue-related results and, in addition, we demonstrate that infrequent invalid targets in the predictive experimental condition evoke larger PDil as compared with frequent ones. Analyses with Linear Mixed Models highlighted that both during the cue and target period, higher levels of PDil were associated with slower reaction times. These findings confirm that PDil is a reliable marker of the expectancy components of endogenous cue-related and exogenous target-related orienting of spatial attention.

Understanding the format of neural representations is a key problem in neuroscience. I present a series of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of the human visual system to investigate the format of how visual information is represented, and how the format changes due to different cognitive demands. First, I investigate how covert spatial attention modifies visual encoding properties at two different levels of analysis—at the level of a single spatial encoding unit, the receptive field, and at the level of the encoding population. Second, I examine how the contents of visual memory are represented across both working memory and long-term memory, systems that have traditionally been considered distinct entities. Together these data reveal how different retinotopic regions of visual cortex flexibly encode information about the visual world and how they are altered in response to varying cognitive demands.

The cortex is a massively recurrent network, characterized by feedforward and feedback connections between brain areas as well as lateral connections within an area. Feedforward, horizontal and feedback responses largely activate separate layers of a cortical unit, meaning they can be dissociated by lamina-resolved neurophysiological techniques. Such techniques are invasive and are therefore rarely used in humans. However, recent developments in high spatial resolution fMRI allow for non-invasive, in vivo measurements of brain responses specific to separate cortical layers. This provides an important opportunity to dissociate between feedforward and feedback brain responses, and investigate communication between brain areas at a more fine- grained level than previously possible in the human species. In this review, we highlight recent studies that successfully used laminar fMRI to isolate layer-specific feedback responses in human sensory cortex. In addition, we review several areas of cognitive neuroscience that stand to benefit from this new technological development, highlighting contemporary hypotheses that yield testable predictions for laminar fMRI. We hope to encourage researchers with the opportunity to embrace this development in fMRI research, as we expect that many future advancements in our current understanding of human brain function will be gained from measuring lamina-specific brain responses.

Originally, the zoom lens model of attention scaling proposed that narrowing attention to a small area of the visual field improves visual perception (Eriksen & James, 1986). A large body of empirical evidence supports this model, showing that narrow attention enhances performance in spatial acuity tasks. Despite this, the zoom lens model does not explicitly consider how attention scaling influences different elements of vision, for example, temporal processing. More recent models of attention scaling suggests that attentional scaling has different effects on spatial and temporal acuity (Goodhew et al., 2017, 2016). However, the evidence to date supporting these models has had one major pitfall: different sized unfilled shapes are presented in an attempt to focus attention in or spread it out broadly. This method is problematic because participants may not spread their attention across the entire region defined by unfilled shapes, instead, attending to only the annulus region of the shape. To address this, we developed a new method to manipulate attention, one which requires the pooling of information across the entire stimulus, not just around the outer border. We then tested the influence of attention scaling on perception using spatial and temporal gap tasks. Across two experiments, we found that sustaining a narrow attention scale improved both spatial and temporal acuity. These findings challenge recent research suggesting that attention scaling has differential impacts on spatial and temporal processing, instead supporting the zoom lens model, proposed over 30 years ago.

An attentional bias to threat is an important maintaining and possibly aetiological factor for social anxiety. Despite this, little is known about the underlying mechanisms of threat biases, such as the relative contributions of top-down and bottom-up attention. In order to measure attentional bias toward threat, the current study employed a variation of the dot-probe task in which participants' attention was initially cued to the left or right side of the screen before an angry face paired with a neutral face was displayed, and subsequently participants responded to a probe in the locus of one of the faces. This design provides separate measures of engagement with and disengagement from threat. In addition, in order to manipulate the availability of top-down attentional resources, participants completed this task under no, low (simple arithmetic task), and high (difficult arithmetic task) working memory load. Higher levels of social anxiety were found to be associated with increased engagement with threat under no-load, whereas this effect was eliminated under low-load and high-load conditions. Moreover, social anxiety was not associated with delayed disengagement from threat. These results highlight the critical role of top-down attention for engaging attention with threat.