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Attentional control theory (ACT) proposes that anxiety is associated with executive functioning deficits. The theory has been widely investigated in adults. The current study tested whether symptoms of childhood anxiety and depression were associated with experimentally measured attentional control in the context of non-emotional and emotional stimuli. Sixty-one children (mean age = 9.23 years, range = 8.39–10.41) reported their trait anxiety and depression symptoms and completed three visual search tasks. The tasks used a variant of an irrelevant singleton paradigm and measured attentional capture by task-irrelevant non-emotional (color) and emotional (facial expressions) distractors. Significant attentional capture by both non-emotional and emotional distractors was observed, and was significantly correlated with trait anxiety and symptoms of depression. The strength of relationship between attentional capture and the symptoms did not differ significantly for non-emotional and emotional distractors. The results suggest that symptoms of childhood anxiety and depression are associated with poorer attentional control both in the presence of emotional and non-emotional stimuli, supporting ACT in younger populations. This attentional deficit in the context of non-emotional information might be as central to childhood internalizing symptoms as attentional biases often observed on tasks investigating processing of emotional stimuli. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to recognize objects in clutter is crucial for human vision, yet the underlying neural computations remain poorly understood. Previous single-unit electrophysiology recordings in inferotemporal cortex in monkeys and fMRI studies of object-selective cortex in humans have shown that the responses to pairs of objects can sometimes be well described as a weighted average of the responses to the constituent objects. Yet, from a computational standpoint, it is not clear how the challenge of object recognition in clutter can be solved if downstream areas must disentangle the identity of an unknown number of individual objects from the confounded average neuronal responses. An alternative idea is that recognition is based on a subpopulation of neurons that are robust to clutter, i.e., that do not show response averaging, but rather robust object-selective responses in the presence of clutter. Here we show that simulations using the HMAX model of object recognition in cortex can fit the aforementioned single-unit and fMRI data, showing that the averaging-like responses can be understood as the result of responses of object-selective neurons to suboptimal stimuli. Moreover, the model showshow object recognition can be achieved by a sparse readout of neurons whose selectivity is robust to clutter. Finally, the model provides a novel prediction about human object recognition performance, namely, that target recognition ability should show a U-shaped dependency on the similarity of simultaneously presented clutter objects. This prediction is confirmed experimentally, supporting a simple, unifying model of how the brain performs object recognition in clutter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to focus on task-relevant information, while suppressing distraction, is critical for human cognition and behavior. Using a delayed-match-to-sample (DMS) task, we investigated the effects of emotional face distractors (positive, negative, and neutral faces) on early and late phases of visual short-term memory (VSTM) maintenance intervals, using low and high VSTM loads. Behavioral results showed decreased accuracy and delayed reaction times (RTs) for high vs. low VSTM load. Event-related potentials (ERPs) showed enhanced frontal N1 and occipital P1 amplitudes for negative faces vs. neutral or positive faces, implying rapid attentional alerting effects and early perceptual processing of negative distractors. However, high VSTM load appeared to inhibit face processing in general, showing decreased N1 amplitudes and delayed P1 latencies. An inverse correlation between the N1 activation difference (high-load minus low-load) and RT costs (high-load minus low-load) was found at left frontal areas when viewing negative distractors, suggesting that the greater the inhibition the lower the RT cost for negative faces. Emotional interference effect was not found in the late VSTMrelated parietal P300, frontal positive slow wave (PSW) and occipital negative slow wave (NSW) components. In general, our findings suggest that the VSTM load modulates the early attention and perception of emotional distractors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The visual system is tuned for rapid detection of faces, with the fastest choice saccade to a face at 100ms. Familiar faces have a more robust representation than do unfamiliar faces, and are detected faster in the absence of awareness and with reduced attentional resources. Faces of family and close friends become familiar over a protracted period involving learning the unique visual appearance, including a view-invariant representation, as well as person knowledge. We investigated the effect of personal familiarity on the earliest stages of face processing by using a saccadic-choice task to measure how fast familiar face detection can happen. Subjects made correct and reliable saccades to familiar faces when unfamiliar faces were distractors at 180ms—very rapid saccades that are 30 to 70ms earlier than the earliest evoked potential modulated by familiarity. By contrast, accuracy of saccades to unfamiliar faces with familiar faces as distractors did not exceed chance. Saccades to faces with object distractors were even faster (110 to 120 ms) and equivalent for familiar and unfamiliar faces, indicating that familiarity does not affect ultra-rapid saccades. We propose that detectors of diagnostic facial features for familiar faces develop in visual cortices through learning and allow rapid detection that precedes explicit recognition of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two experiments were aimed at investigating whether the implementation of voluntary saccades in White participants could be modulated more strongly by gaze distractors embedded in White versus Black faces. Participants were instructed to make a rightward or leftward saccade, depending on a central directional cue. Saccade direction could be either congruent or incongruent with gaze direction of the distractor face. In Experiment 1, White faces produced greater interference on saccadic accuracy than Black faces when the averted-gaze face and cue onset were simultaneous rather than separated by a 900-ms asynchrony. In Experiment 2, two temporal intervals (50 ms vs. 1,000 ms) occurred between the initial presentation of the face with direct-gaze and the averted-gaze face onset, whereas the averted-gaze face and cue onset were synchronous. A greater interference emerged for White versus Black faces irrespective of the temporal interval. Overall, these findings suggest that saccadic generation system is sensitive to features of face stimuli conveying eye gaze. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on visual cognitive load have reported inconsistent effects of distractor interference when distractors have visual characteristic that are similar to the cognitive load. Some studies have shown that the cognitive load enhances distractor interference, while others reported an attenuating effect. We attribute these inconsistencies to the amount of cognitive load that a person is required to maintain. Lower amounts of cognitive load increase distractor interference by orienting attention toward visually similar distractors. Higher amounts of cognitive load attenuate distractor interference by depleting attentional resources needed to process distractors. In the present study, cognitive load consisted of faces (Experiments 1-3) or scenes (Experiment 2). Participants performed a selective attention task in which they ignored face distractors while judging a color of a target dot presented nearby, under differing amounts of load. Across these experiments distractor interference was greater in the low-load condition and smaller in the high-load condition when the content of the cognitive load had similar visual characteristic to the distractors. We also found that when a series of judgments needed to be made, the effect was apparent for the first trial but not for the second. We further tested an involvement of working memory capacity (WMC) in the load effect (Experiment 3). Interestingly, both high and low WMC groups received an equivalent effect of the cognitive load in the first distractor, suggesting these effects are fairly automatic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) enzyme is a major determinant of prefrontal dopamine levels. The Val158Met polymorphism affects COMT enzymatic activity and has been associated with variation in executive function and affective processing. This study investigated the effect of COMT genotype on the flexible modulation of the balance between processing self-generated and processing stimulus-oriented information, in the presence or absence of affective distractors. Analyses included 124 healthy adult participants, who were also assessed on standard working memory (WM) tasks. Relative to Val carriers, Met homozygotes made fewer errors when selecting and manipulating self-generated thoughts. This effect was partly accounted for by an association between COMT genotype and visuospatial WM performance. We also observed a complex interaction between the influence of affective distractors, COMT genotype and sex on task accuracy: male, but not female, participants showed a sensitivity to the affective distractors that was dependent on COMT genotype. This was not accounted for by WM performance. This study provides novel evidence of the role of dopaminergic genetic variation on the ability to select and manipulate self-generated thoughts. The results also suggest sexually dimorphic effects of COMT genotype on the influence of affective distractors on executive function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies in the social anxiety arena have shown an impaired attentional control system, similar to that found in trait anxiety. However, the effect of task demands on social anxiety in socially threatening stimuli, such as angry faces, remains unseen. In the present study, 54 university students scoring high and low in the Social Interaction and Performance Anxiety and Avoidance Scale (SIPAAS) questionnaire, participated in a target letter discrimination task while task-irrelevant face stimuli (angry, disgust, happy, and neutral) were simultaneously presented. The results showed that high (compared to low) socially anxious individuals were more prone to distraction by task-irrelevant stimuli, particularly under high perceptual load conditions. More importantly, for such individuals, the accuracy proportions for angry faces significantly differed between the low and high perceptual load conditions, which is discussed in light of current evolutionary models of social anxiety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual cortical alpha oscillations are involved in attentional gating of incoming visual information. It has been shown that spatial and feature-based attentional selection result in increased alpha oscillations over the cortical regions representing sensory input originating from the unattended visual field and task-irrelevant visual features, respectively. However, whether attentional gating in the case of object based selection is also associated with alpha oscillations has not been investigated before. Here we measured anticipatory electroencephalography (EEG) alpha oscillations while participants were cued to attend to foveal face or word stimuli, the processing of which is known to have right and left hemispheric lateralization, respectively. The results revealed that in the case of simultaneously displayed, overlapping face and word stimuli, attending to the words led to increased power of parieto-occipital alpha oscillations over the right hemisphere as compared to when faces were attended. This object category-specific modulation of the hemispheric lateralization of anticipatory alpha oscillations was maintained during sustained attentional selection of sequentially presented face and word stimuli. These results imply that in the case of object-based attentional selection-similarly to spatial and feature-based attention-gating of visual information processing might involve visual cortical alpha oscillations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ventral attentional network (VAN) is thought to drive "stimulus driven attention" [e.g., Asplund, C. L., Todd, J. J., Snyder, A. P., & Marois, R. A central role for the lateral prefrontal cortex in goal-directed and stimulus-driven attention. Nature Neuroscience, 13, 507-512, 2010; Shulman, G. L., McAvoy, M. P., Cowan, M. C., Astafiev, S. V., Tansy, A. P., D' Avossa, G., et al. Quantitative analysis of attention and detection signals during visual search. Journal of Neurophysiology, 90, 3384-3397, 2003]; in other words, it instantiates within the current stimulus environment the top-down attentional biases maintained by the dorsal attention network [e.g., Kincade, J. M., Abrams, R. A., Astafiev, S. V., Shulman, G. L., & Corbetta, M. An event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging study of voluntary and stimulus-driven orienting of attention. The Journal of Neuroscience: The Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 25, 4593-4604, 2005]. Previous work has shown that the dorsal attentional network is sensitive to trial history, such that it is challenged by changes in task goals and facilitated by repetition thereof [e.g., Kristjánsson, A., Vuilleumier, P., Schwartz, S., Macaluso, E., & Driver, J. Neural basis for priming of pop-out during visual search revealed with fMRI. Cerebral Cortex, 17, 1612-1624, 2007]. Here, we investigate whether the VAN also preserves information across trials such that it is challenged when previously rejected stimuli become task relevant. We used fMRI to investigate the sensitivity of the ventral attentional system to prior history effects as measured by the distractor preview effect. This behavioral phenomenon reflects a bias against stimuli that have historically not supported task performance. We found regions traditionally considered to be part of the VAN (right middle frontal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus and right supramarginal gyrus) [Shulman, G. L., McAvoy, M. P., Cowan, M. C., Astafiev, S. V., Tansy, A. P., D' Avossa, G., et al. Quantitative analysis of attention and detection signals during visual search. Journal of Neurophysiology, 90, 3384-3397, 2003] to be more active when task-relevant stimuli had not supported task performance in a previous trial than when they had. Investigations of the ventral visual system suggest that this effect is more reliably driven by trial history preserved within the VAN than that preserved within the visual system per se. We conclude that VAN maintains its interactions with top-down stimulus biases and bottom-up stimulation across time, allowing previous experience with the stimulus environment to influence attentional biases under current circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efficient processing of the visual world requires that distracting items be avoided, or at least rapidly disengaged from. The mechanisms by which highly salient, yet irrelevant, stimuli lead to distraction, however, are not well understood. Here, we utilized a particularly strong type of distractor-images of human faces-to investigate the mechanisms of distraction and the involuntarily biasing of attention. Across three experiments using a novel discrimination task, we provided new evidence that the robust distraction triggered by faces may not reflect enhanced attraction but, instead, may reflect an extended holding of attention. Specifically, the onset of a task-irrelevant distractor initially impaired target performance regardless of the identity of that distractor (fearful faces, neutral faces, or places). In contrast, an extended period of distraction was observed only when the distractor was a face. Our results thus demonstrate two distinct mechanisms contributing to distraction: an initial involuntary capture to any sudden event and a subsequent holding of attention to a potentially meaningful, yet task-irrelevant stimulus-in this case, a human face. Critically, the latter holding of attention by faces was not unique to fearful faces but also occurred for neutral faces. The present results dissociate attentional capture from hold in another way as well, since the capture occurred regardless of the nature of the distractors, but the extended holding of attention was dependent upon the ongoing distractor context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We tested the specificity of human face search efficiency by examining whether there is a broad window of detection for various face-like stimuli-human and animal faces-or whether own-species faces receive greater attentional allocation. We assessed the strength of the own-species face detection bias by testing whether human faces are located more efficiently than other animal faces, when presented among various other species' faces, in heterogeneous 16-, 36-, and 64-item arrays. Across all array sizes, we found that, controlling for distractor type, human faces were located faster and more accurately than primate and mammal faces, and that, controlling for target type, searches were faster when distractors were human faces compared to animal faces, revealing more efficient processing of human faces regardless of their role as targets or distractors (Experiment 1). Critically, these effects remained when searches were for specific species' faces (human, chimpanzee, otter), ruling out a category-level explanation (Experiment 2). Together, these results suggest that human faces may be processed more efficiently than animal faces, both when task-relevant (targets) and task-irrelevant (distractors), even in direct competition with other faces. These results suggest that there is not a broad window of detection for all face-like patterns but that human adults process own-species' faces more efficiently than other species' faces. Such own-species search efficiencies may arise through experience with own-species faces throughout development or may be privileged early in development, due to the evolutionary importance of conspecifics' faces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As dementia progresses, cognitive functions decline in patients, and caregivers and other support staff gradually lose the means to communicate with them. However, some caregivers believe that patients can still recognize their surroundings even when they show akinesis with mutism. In this study, we observed eye movements (preferential-looking paradigm) to detect the presence of residual cognitive functions in a patient with severe frontotemporal dementia (FTD). The subject was a 76-year-old female. At the time of observation, she had lost all spontaneous activities. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) imaging showed dense atrophy of the bilateral frontotemporal lobe, but the parieto-occipital lobe was preserved. A preferential-looking paradigm was used in the experiment, whereby two different faces (learned and non-learned) were simultaneously presented to the patient on a TV monitor. As a result, we found no significant differences in looking time between the two faces. However, when the saccade timing to the presented faces was examined, a much longer latency was observed for the right than the left side of the target faces. Even though the patient had lost capacity for spontaneous activity due to severe FTD, we were able to observe partial residual cognitive ability using the eye-movement paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We respond more quickly to our own face than to other faces, but there is debate over whether this is connected to attention-grabbing properties of the self-face. In two experiments, we investigate whether the self-face selectively captures attention, and the attentional conditions under which this might occur. In both experiments, we examined whether different types of face (self, friend, stranger) provide differential levels of distraction when processing self, friend and stranger names. In Experiment 1, an image of a distractor face appeared centrally – inside the focus of attention – behind a target name, with the faces either upright or inverted. In Experiment 2, distractor faces appeared peripherally – outside the focus of attention – in the left or right visual field, or bilaterally. In both experiments, self-name recognition was faster than other name recognition, suggesting a self-referential processing advantage. The presence of the self-face did not cause more distraction in the naming task compared to other types of face, either when presented inside (Experiment 1) or outside (Experiment 2) the focus of attention. Distractor faces had different effects across the two experiments: when presented inside the focus of attention (Experiment 1), self and friend images facilitated self and friend naming, respectively. This was not true for stranger stimuli, suggesting that faces must be robustly represented to facilitate name recognition. When presented outside the focus of attention (Experiment 2), no facilitation occurred. Instead, we report an interesting distraction effect caused by friend faces when processing strangers’ names. We interpret this as a “social importance” effect, whereby we may be tuned to pick out and pay attention to familiar friend faces in a crowd. We conclude that any speed of processing advantages observed in the self-face processing literature are not driven by automatic attention capture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anxiety is associated with increased attentional capture by threat. Previous studies have used simultaneous or briefly separated (<1 s) presentation of threat distractors and target stimuli. Here, we tested the hypothesis that high trait anxious participants would show a longer time window within which distractors cause disruption to subsequent task processing, and that this would particularly be observed for stimuli of moderate or ambiguous threat value. A novel temporally separated emotional distractor task was used. Face or house distractors were presented for 250 ms at short (∼1.6 s) or long (∼3 s) intervals prior to a letter string comprising Xs or Ns. Trait anxiety was associated with slowed identification of letter strings presented at long intervals after face distractors with part surprise/part fear expressions. In other words, these distractors had an impact on high anxious individuals' speed of target identification seconds after their offset. This was associated with increased activity in the fusiform gyrus and amygdala and reduced dorsal anterior cingulate recruitment.This pattern of activity may reflect impoverished recruitment of reactive control mechanisms to damp down stimulus-specific processing in subcortical and higher visual regions. These findings have implications for understanding how threatrelated attentional biases in anxiety may lead to dysfunction in everyday settings where stimuli of moderate, potentially ambiguous, threat value such as those used here are fairly common, and where attentional disruption lasting several seconds may have a profound impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the present study is to examine the effect of neutral and emotional facial expressions on voluntary attentional control using a working memory (WM) task in adolescents with major depressive disorder (MDD). We administered the Emotional Face n-back (EFNBACK) task, a visual WM task with neutral, happy and angry faces as distractors to 22 adolescents with MDD (mean age 15.7 years) and 21 healthy controls (HC) (mean age 14.7 years). There was a significant group by distractor type interaction ( p = 0.045) for mean percent accuracy rates. Group comparisons showed that MDD youth were less accurate on neutral trials than HC ( p = 0.027). The two groups did not differ on angry, happy and blank trials ( p > 0.05). Reaction time did not differ across groups. In addition, when comparing the differences between accuracies on neutral trials and each of the happy and angry trials, respectively [(HAP-NEUT) and (ANG-NEUT)], there was a group effect on (HAP-NEUT) where the difference was larger in MDD than HC ( p = 0.009) but not on ANG-NEUT ( p > 0.05). Findings were independent of memory load. Findings indicate that attentional control to neutral faces is impaired and negatively affected performance on a WM task in adolescents with MDD. Such an impact of neutral faces on attentional control in MDD may be at the core of the social-cognitive impairment observed in this population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is ample evidence to show that many types of visual information, including emotional information, could be processed in the absence of visual awareness. For example, it has been shown that masked subliminal facial expressions can induce priming and adaptation effects. However, stimulus made invisible in different ways could be processed to different extent and have differential effects. In this study, we adopted a flanker type behavioral method to investigate whether a flanker rendered invisible through Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS) could induce a congruency effect on the discrimination of a visible target. Specifically, during the experiment, participants judged the expression (either happy or fearful) of a visible face in the presence of a nearby invisible face (with happy or fearful expression). Results show that participants were slower and less accurate in discriminating the expression of the visible face when the expression of the invisible flanker face was incongruent. Thus, facial expression information rendered invisible with CFS and presented a different spatial location could enhance or interfere with consciously processed facial expression information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The human face conveys important social signals when people interact in social contexts. The current study investigated the relationship between face recognition and emotional intelligence, and how societal factors of emotion and race influence people's face recognition. Participants' recognition accuracy, reaction time, sensitivity, and response bias were measured to examine their face-processing ability. Fifty Caucasian undergraduates (38 females, 12 males; average age = 21.76 years) participated in a face recognition task in which they discriminated previously presented target faces from novel distractor faces. A positive correlation between participants' emotional intelligence scores and their performance on the face recognition task was observed, suggesting that face recognition ability was associated with emotional or social intelligence. Additionally, Caucasian participants recognized happy faces better than angry or neutral faces. It was also observed that people recognized Asian faces better than Caucasian ones, which appears to be contradictory to the classic other-race effect. The present study suggests that some societal factors could influence face processing, and face recognition ability could in turn predict social intelligence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fundamental biases in affective information processing are modulated by individual differences in the emotional response to environmental stimuli that may be partly based on the individual's genetic make-up. To extend prior dot probe studies on attention genetics, we used a visual-search paradigm (VSP) with pictures of angry and happy faces of both sexes as targets, neutral faces as distractors, and a varying set size. Participants were selected a priori depending on their 5-HTTLPR (s/s, s/l, l/l; on a constant rs25531 A-allele background) and COMTval158met (val/val, valmet, met/met) genotypes and were matched for sex and age. We demonstrate a bias towards angry male faces (as opposed to happy male faces) irrespective of 5-HTTLPR genotype in the first experimental block that was maintained during the second experimental block only in carriers of the s-allele, which implies differential habituation processes. While a bias towards angry male faces was observed irrespective of COMTval158met genotype, only individuals with the val/val genotype exhibited a bias towards a happy female face (as opposed to an angry female face). In sum, our results both replicate and extend prior findings in the field of attention genetics and add important pieces of information to the research on attentional biases in emotion processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oxytocin (OT) is released in response to social signals, particularly positive ones like eye contact, social touch, sexual behavior, and affiliative vocalizations. Conversely, exogenous delivery of OT has diverse behavioral effects, sometimes promoting affiliative and prosocial behaviors, but sometimes suppressing them. Here, we argue that one unifying interpretation of these diverse effects is to view OT as an evolutionarily conserved physiological signal indicating affiliative interactions and predicting their behavioral consequences. In this model, OT regulates the way information about the social environment accesses the neural circuitry responsible for social behavior, thereby shaping it in sometimes counter intuitive but adaptive ways. Notably, prosociality is not always the most adaptive response to an affiliative signal from another individual. In many circumstances, an asocial or even antisocial response may confer greater fitness benefits. We argue that the behavioral effects of exogenous OT delivery not only parallel the behavioral effects of affiliative interactions, but are themselves adaptive responses to affiliative interactions. In support of this idea, we review recent evidence that OT does not unilaterally enhance social attention, as previously thought, but rather can reduce the typical prioritization of social information at the expense of other information or goals. Such diminished social vigilance may be an adaptive response to affiliative social interactions because it frees attentional resources for the pursuit of other goals. Finally, we predict that OT may mediate other behavioral consequences of social interactions, such as reduced predator vigilance, and argue that this is a rich avenue for future behavioral and neurobiological study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Neuropsychological deficits and emotion dysregulation are present in symptomatic and euthymic patients with bipolar disorder. However, there is little evidence on how cognitive functioning is influenced by emotion, what the neural correlates of emotional distraction effects are, and whether such deficits are a consequence or a precursor of the disorder. The authors used functional MRI (fMRI) to investigate these questions. Method: fMRI was used firstto localize the neural network specific to a certain cognitive task (mental arithmetic) and then to test the effect of emotional distractors on this network. Euthymic patients with bipolar I disorder (N=22), two populations at high risk for developing the disorder (unaffected first-degree relatives of individuals with bipolar disorder [N=17]), and healthy participants with hypomanic personality traits [N=22]) were tested, along with three age-, gender-, and education-matched healthy comparison groups (N=22, N = 17, N=24, respectively). Results: There were no differences in performance or activation in the task network for mental arithmetic. However, while all participants exhibited slower responses when emotional distractors were present, this response slowing was greatly enlarged in bipolar patients. Similarly, task-related activation was generally increased under emotional distraction; however, bipolar patients exhibited a further increase in right parietal activation that correlated positively with the response slowing effect. Conclusions: The results suggest that emotional dysregulation leads to exacerbated neuropsychological deficits in bipolar patients, as evidenced by behavioral slowing and task-related hyperactivation. The lack of such a deficit in high-risk populations suggests that it occurs only after disease onset, rather than representing a vulnerability marker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The claim that face perception is mediated by a specialized “face module” that proceeds automatically, independently of attention (e.g., Kanwisher, 2000) can be reconciled with load theory claims that visual perception has limited capacity (e.g., Lavie, 1995) by hypothesizing that face perception has face-specific capacity limits. We tested this hypothesis by comparing the effects of face and nonface perceptual load on distractor face processing. Participants searched a central array of either faces or letter strings for a pop star versus politician's face or name and made speeded classification responses. Perceptual load was varied through the relevant search set size. Response competition effects from a category-congruent or -incongruent peripheral distractor face were eliminated with more than two faces in the face search task, but were unaffected by perceptual load in the name search task. These results support the hypothesis that face perception has face-specific capacity limits and resolve apparent discrepancies in previous research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background: The attentional blink (AB) phenomenon was used to assess the effect of emotional information on early visual attention in typically developing (TD) children and children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The AB effect is the momentary perceptual unawareness that follows target identification in a rapid serial visual processing stream. It is abolished or reduced for emotional stimuli, indicating that emotional information has privileged access to early visual attention processes. Methods: We examined the AB effect for faces with neutral and angry facial expressions in 8- to 14-year-old children with and without an ASD diagnosis. Results: Children with ASD exhibited the same magnitude AB effect as TD children for both neutral and angry faces. Conclusions: Early visual attention to emotional facial expressions was preserved in children with ASD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eye tracking research has shown that infants develop a repertoire of attentional capacities during the first year. The majority of studies examining the early development of attention comes from Western, high-resource countries. We examined visual attention in a heterogeneous sample of infants in rural Malawi (N = 312-376, depending on analysis). Infants were assessed with eye-tracking-based tests that targeted visual orienting, anticipatory looking, and attention to faces at 7 and 9 months. Consistent with prior research, infants exhibited active visual search for salient visual targets, anticipatory saccades to predictable events, and a robust attentional bias for happy and fearful faces. Individual variations in these processes had low to moderate odd-even split-half and test-retest reliability. There were no consistent associations between attention measures and gestational age, nutritional status, or characteristics of the rearing environment (i.e., maternal cognition, psychosocial well-being, socioeconomic status, and care practices). The results replicate infants' early attentional biases in a large, unique sample, and suggest that some of these biases (e.g., bias for faces) are pronounced in low-resource settings. The results provided no evidence that the initial manifestation of infants' attentional capacities is associated with risk factors that are common in low-resource environments., (© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

The case of human deafness constitutes a unique opportunity to examine possible consequences for perceptual processing due to altered sensory experiences. We tested whether deaf-in contrast to hearing-individuals are more susceptible to visual distraction from peripheral than from central face versus object stimuli. The participants were required to classify the gender of a target male or female symbol presented either alone (low perceptual load) or together with three filler symbols (high perceptual load), while ignoring gender-congruent or -incongruent face versus object distractors presented at central or peripheral positions. The gender classifications were affected by distractor gender under low, but not under high, perceptual load in hearing participants. In contrast, the responses of deaf participants were similarly influenced by distractor gender under both levels of perceptual load. There was no evidence for generally enhanced attention to the visual periphery in deaf individuals. Our results indicate that auditory deprivation may result in enhanced attentional capacities under high perceptual load. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has often been shown that independent self-construals (emphasizing personal uniqueness) coincide with an analytic, context-independent style of information processing whereas interdependent self-construals (emphasizing relatedness with others) promote holistic, context-dependent processing. The present study suggests that these cognitive variations between different self-construals can be accounted for by higher order cognitive functions for the control of ongoing mental operations (i.e., executive functions). Using an experimental paradigm, we showed naturalistic pictures displaying a face and a place superimposed on each other. On each trial, one of these dimensions served as a target (depicted in magenta), while the other served as a distractor (depicted in gray). The results showed that independency primed participants were less affected by distractors appearing in the presence of a target (i.e., smaller interference effect) than interdependency primed participants. Importantly, the independency primed participants revealed evidence of mental inhibition of distractors, showing longer reaction times when previously ignored distractors subsequently became targets (i.e., a negatively signed priming effect). Thus, our study is the first to suggest that differences in fundamental processes of cognitive control, namely, the inhibition of automatically triggered (but inappropriate) response tendencies, are the driving force behind the many previously reported differences between individuals primed for independency versus interdependency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally, anxiety has been associated with a selective attentional bias for threat and a decreased capacity in attentional control. In two different experiments, we investigated whether individuals with different levels of self-reported state anxiety (Experiment 1) and induced anxiety (Experiment 2) had impaired response inhibition processes (attentional control deficit) as characterized by a different response style in the presence of negative stimuli under low and high perceptual load conditions. A go/no-go paradigm with emotional distractors (angry, happy, and neutral faces) was used to provide measures of perceptual sensitivity, inhibition, and response style. Our findings showed that perceptual sensitivity, as assessed by the d′ parameter of signal detection theory, was reduced in all participants for angry faces under low perceptual load, where enough perceptual resources were available to be attracted by distractors. Importantly, despite similar perceptual sensitivity, the beta parameter indicated that high state anxiety individuals in both experiments were less flexible at adjusting to task demands in the presence of angry face distractors by adopting a stricter criterion. Implications of findings are discussed within current models of attentional control in anxiety. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the role of attention in the processing of social stimuli in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Research has demonstrated that, for typical adults, faces have a special status in attention and are processed in an automatic and mandatory fashion even when participants attempt to ignore them. Under conditions of high load in a selective attention task, when irrelevant stimuli are usually not processed, typical adults continue to process distractor faces. Although there is evidence of a lack of attentional bias towards faces in ASD, there has been no direct test of whether faces are processed automatically using the distractor-face paradigm.In the present study 16 typical adults and 16 adults with ASD performed selective attention tasks with face and musical instrument distractors. The results indicated that even when the load of the central task was high, typical adults continued to be distracted by irrelevant face stimuli, whereas individuals with ASD were able to ignore them. In the equivalent non-social task, distractors had no effect at high load for either group. The results suggest that faces are processed in an automatic and mandatory fashion in typical adults but not in adults with ASD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facial expressions play an important role in successful social interactions, with previous research suggesting that facial expressions may be processed involuntarily. In the current study, we investigate whether involuntary processing of facial expressions would also occur when facial expression distractors are simultaneously presented in the same spatial location as facial expression targets. Targets and distractors from another stimulus class (lions) were also used. Results indicated that angry facial expression distractors interfered more than neutral face distractors with the ability to respond to both face and lion targets. These findings suggest that information from angry facial expressions can be extracted rapidly from a very brief presentation (50 ms), providing compelling evidence that angry facial expressions are processed involuntarily. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To examine the time course of effects of working memory (WM) load on interference control, ERPs were measured in a combined WM and Stroop task. A WM load of 0, 2, or 4 letters was imposed, and during the maintenance-interval Stroop trials were presented that required participants to classify names of famous people while ignoring faces that were either congruent or incongruent with the names. Behavioral interference was not modulated by WM load, but WM load led to an overall reduction of Stroop stimulus encoding as reflected by reduced N170 and N250 amplitudes independent of congruency. Incongruent distractor faces induced interference as shown by a delayed and reduced positivity between 480-600 ms (N450) and an enhanced positivity between 760-1000 ms (P600), indicating longer stimulus evaluation, conflict detection, and conflict resolution, respectively. WM load led to an increase of the P600 at frontal and parietal sites, possibly reflecting PFC-driven top-down control of posterior sites, necessary for conflict resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quite a number of studies have tested whether the affective valence of stimuli can guide attention in visual search. Studies using schematic affective faces frequently found a relative search asymmetry (RSA), with more efficient search for a negative face in a friendly crowd than vice versa. Whether, however, this effect relates to differences in affect or to the confounded differences in perceptual features is unknown. The present study proposes and tests a similarity-based account for the RSA. Experiments 1a and 1b first replicate the typical RSA. Experiment 2 shows that the stimulus could be simplified to some degree without losing the RSA. Experiments 3 and 4, finally, demonstrate that the RSA could be reversed by a rather simple stimulus change, that leaves the facial expression intact. It is concluded that the strong dependence of the RSA on stimulus factors seriously questions the claim that emotional factors drive the RSA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A crucial prediction of perceptual load theory is that high perceptual load can eliminate interference from distractors. However, Lavie et al. (Psychol Sci 14:510–515, ) found that high perceptual load did not eliminate interference when the distractor was a face. The current experiments examined the interaction between familiarity and perceptual load in modulating interference in a name search task. The data reveal that high perceptual load eliminated the interference effect for unfamiliar distractors that were faces or objects, but did not eliminate the interference for familiar distractors that were faces or objects. Based on these results, we proposed that the processing of familiar and natural stimuli may be immune to the effect of perceptual load. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated the role of dopamine in working memory by examining effects of withdrawing dopaminergic medication in patients with Parkinson’s disease. Resistance to distraction during a delayed response task was abnormally enhanced in Parkinson’s disease patients OFF medication relative to controls. Conversely, performance on a backward digit span test was impaired in these same Parkinson’s disease patients OFF medication. Dopaminergic medication reinstated susceptibility to distraction and backward digit span performance, so that performance of Parkinson’s disease patients ON medication did not differ from that of controls. We hypothesize that the enhanced distractor resistance and impaired backward digit span in Parkinson’s disease reflects low dopamine levels in the striatum, and perhaps upregulated frontal dopamine levels. Dopaminergic medication may reinstate distractibility by normalizing the balance between striatal and prefrontal dopamine transmission. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The ability to maintain information online beyond sensory stimulation is regarded as a key contribution of working memory to goal-directed behaviour. It is widely accepted that sustained neural activity is a key mechanism of stimulus maintenance, but it is unclear to what extent the neural generators of sustained activity change from stimulus-encoding to maintenance. Using event-related potentials in humans, we show that, in a delayed match-to-sample task, slow shifts over parieto-occipital electrode sites had a different topography and polarity during encoding and delay maintenance of images depicting scenes. This clearly demonstrates that neural generators of sustained activity associated with stimulus-encoding and delay maintenance differed, and that the change between these generators occurred time-locked to the onset of the delay period. We also investigated how monetary reward incentives modulated the amplitude and topography of sustained delay activity and the ability to suppress irrelevant distracting information during the delay. Reward incentives improved maintenance performance and this was correlated with an expansion of the parieto-occipital electrode sites that were entrained into sustained delay activity (rather than improved distractor suppression), suggesting that under the influence of reward, the parieto-occipital regions that contributed to delay maintenance expanded in size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated whether similarity among faces could modulate the face-capturing effect in change detection. In Experiment 1, a singleton search task was used to demonstrate that a face stimulus captures attention and the odd-one-out hypothesis cannot account for the results. Searching for a face target was faster than searching for a nonface target no matter whether distractor-distractor similarity was low or high. The fast search, however, did not lead to a face-detection advantage in Experiment 2 when the pre- and postchange faces were highly similar. When participants in Experiment 3 had to divide their attention between two faces in stimulus displays for change detection, detection performance was worse than performance in detecting nonface changes. The face-capturing effect alone is insufficient to produce the face-detection advantage. Face processing is efficient but its effect on performance depends on the stimulus-task context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the human brain, a network of frontal and parietal regions is commonly recruited during tasks that demand the deliberate, focused control of thought and action. Previously, using a simple target detection task, we reported striking differences in the selectivity of the BOLD response in anatomically distinct subregions of this network. In particular, it was observed that the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) followed a tightly tuned function, selectively responding only to the current target object. Here, we examine this functional specialization further, using adapted versions of our original task. Our results demonstrate that the response of the right IFG to targets is a strong and replicable phenomenon. It occurs under increased attentional load, when targets and distractors are equally frequent, and when controlling for inhibitory processes. These findings support the hypothesis that the right IFG responds selectively to those items that are of the most relevance to the currently intended task schema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The behavioural adjustment that follows the experience of conflict has been extensively studied in humans, leading to influential models of executive-control adjustment. Recent studies have revealed striking similarities in conflict-induced behavioural adjustment between humans and monkeys, indicating that monkeys can provide a model to study the underlying neural substrates and mechanisms of such behaviour. These studies have advanced our knowledge about the role of different prefrontal brain regions, including the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), in executive-control adjustment and suggest a pivotal role for the DLPFC in the dynamic tuning of executive control and, consequently, in behavioural adaptation to changing environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-serving attributions occur when negative personal outcomes are ascribed to external circumstances and when positive outcomes are ascribed to internal factors. Individuals strategically employ the self-serving bias to maintain and protect positive self-views. The current study investigated the neural correlates of the self-serving bias using dense array EEG, giving 20 participants false (success or failure) feedback during a facial working memory task. Participants made self-serving attributions during the task, primarily following failure feedback. Voltage and source analyses in response to attribution stimuli revealed that, compared to self-serving responses, non-self-serving attributions were preceded by enhanced dorsomedial frontal cortex activity. This finding suggests that unbiased attributions require greater self-control, overriding the automatic tendency for self-enhancement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influence of stereotype and grammatical information (masculine intended as generic) on the representation of gender in language was investigated using a sentence evaluation paradigm. The first sentence introduced a role name (e.g., The spies came out ...) and the second sentence contained explicit information about the gender of one or more of the characters (e.g., ...one of the women ...). The experiment was conducted in French, German, and English. In contrast to English, stereotypicality of role names had no influence on readers' male biased representations in French and German, where interpretations were dominated by the masculinity of the masculine (allegedly) intended as generic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigated the nature of attention to facial expressions using an oculomotor capture paradigm. Participants were required to make a speeded saccade toward a predefined target and ignore distractors. The valence (happy or angry) and orientation (upright or inverted) of the target and distractors varied. We found evidence that irrelevant happy and angry face distractors did capture attention, but only when emotions were the target of search. Eye movements were not directed toward angry distractors any more often than toward happy distractors, and saccades to angry face targets were no faster than to other targets. The results provide evidence that emotion information can be used as a feature to voluntarily select targets and direct attention, suggesting attention is not necessary for the identification of emotional expression. There was no evidence, however, that angry face stimuli have a special priority for reflexively orienting attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One's own face possesses two properties that make it prone to grab attention: It is a face, and, in addition, it is a self-referential stimulus. The question of whether the self-face is actually an especially attention-grabbing stimulus was addressed by using a face–name interference paradigm. We investigated whether interference from a flanking self-face on the processing of a target classmate's name was stronger than interference from a classmate's flanking face on the processing of one's own name as the target. In a control condition a third familiar face served as the flanker for both decisions from the participant's own name and from the classmate's name. The presentation of the self-face as a flanker produced significantly more interference on the identification of a classmate's name than the presentation of that classmate's face did on the identification of one's own name. This result was due to the interfering power of the self-face and not to a particular resistance of one's name to interfering facial stimuli. We argue that the emotional value or the high familiarity of one's own face may explain its attention-grabbing property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Threat-related stimuli are strong competitors for attention, particularly in anxious individuals. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with healthy human volunteers to study how the processing of threat-related distractors is controlled and whether this alters as anxiety levels increase. Our work builds upon prior analyses of the cognitive control functions of lateral prefrontal cortex (lateral PFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). We found that rostral ACC was strongly activated by infrequent threat-related distractors, consistent with a role for this area in responding to unexpected processing conflict caused by salient emotional stimuli. Participants with higher anxiety levels showed both less rostral ACC activity overall and reduced recruitment of lateral PFC as expectancy of threat-related distractors was established. This supports the proposal that anxiety is associated with reduced top-down control over threat-related distractors. Our results suggest distinct roles for rostral ACC and lateral PFC in governing the processing of task-irrelevant, threat-related stimuli, and indicate reduced recruitment of this circuitry in anxiety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Models of face processing suggest that recognizing a person should prime recognition of a consecutive, but different, image of the same person. This prediction is tested in four experiments using large blocks of different views of the same person. The experiments demonstrate that reaction times decreased according to a negative power function as the number of repetitions increased. After sufficient repetitions, however, the reaction times lengthened. The presentation of a different familiar person between blocks of repetitions caused the reaction time for the target to increase to a level equivalent to that with no repetitions. Experiments 2 and 3 investigated the effect of different intervening stimuli (unfamiliar faces and objects). Such stimuli reduced the effect of mass repetition-but the reduction using a familiar face was greater than that with either unfamiliar faces or objects. Experiment 4 confirmed that the effects of massive repetition occur for a face familiarity task as well as for face identification tasks. The results are discussed in termsof the predictions of Burton's (1994) IACL model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]