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Participants' Attention (participant + attention)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Psychology	50%

Selected Abstracts

Brain mechanisms of involuntary visuospatial attention: An event-related potential study

HUMAN BRAIN MAPPING, Issue 4 2005
Shimin Fu
Abstract The brain mechanisms mediating visuospatial attention were investigated by recording event-related potentials (ERPs) during a line-orientation discrimination task. Nonpredictive peripheral cues were used to direct participant's attention involuntarily to a spatial location. The earliest attentional modulation was observed in the P1 component (peak latency about 130 ms), with the valid trials eliciting larger P1 than invalid trials. Moreover, the attentional modulations on both the amplitude and latency of the P1 and N1 components had a different pattern as compared to previous studies with voluntary attention tasks. In contrast, the earliest visual ERP component, C1 (peak latency about 80 ms), was not modulated by attention. Low-resolution brain electromagnetic tomography (LORETA) showed that the earliest attentional modulation occurred in extrastriate cortex (middle occipital gyrus, BA 19) but not in the primary visual cortex. Later attention-related reactivations in the primary visual cortex were found at about 110 ms after stimulus onset. The results suggest that involuntary as well as voluntary attention modulates visual processing at the level of extrastriate cortex; however, at least some different processes are involved by involuntary attention compared to voluntary attention. In addition, the possible feedback from higher visual cortex to the primary visual cortex is faster and occurs earlier in involuntary relative to voluntary attention task. Hum Brain Mapp, 2005. © 2005 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]

Emotional reactions to harmful intergroup behavior

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 1 2006
Ernestine H. Gordijn
In this paper, we examined reactions to situations in which, although one is not personally involved, one could see oneself connected to either the perpetrators or the victims of unfair behavior. We manipulated participants' similarity and measured their identification to either one of two groups which participants later learned was the victim or the perpetrator of harmful behavior. As predicted, making salient similarities to the victims lead participants to: 1) appraise the perpetrator's behavior as more unfair; 2) experience more anger; and 3) be more likely to take action against it and less prone to show support for it as a function of their level of identification with their salient ingroup. In sharp contrast, focusing participants' attention on their similarities to the perpetrators reversed this pattern of findings: Compared to high identifiers, low identifiers appraised the behavior as more unfair than high identifiers, which made them feel angry (and guilty) and less likely to show support for the perpetrator's behavior. The data also provide strong support for a mediational model in which appraisal of the situation colors the emotional reaction which in turn orients action tendencies. We discuss the implications of our findings for the issue of group-based emotions. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

The effect of Flash banners on multiattribute decision making: Distractor or source of arousal?

PSYCHOLOGY & MARKETING, Issue 5 2006
Rong-Fuh Day
The role of peripheral flash advertisements in decision making as a distractor or a source of arousal was examined. Participants were asked to perform multiattribute decision making in a display environment with or without banners of advertisement flashing occasionally in the peripheral region of the display. The flash banners accelerated the speed of decision making, although the participants rarely made eye movements in response to the banners or fixated their eyes on them. It was interesting to note that the participants' pupil sizes increased with the presence of flash banners. These findings suggest that rather than distracting participants' attention, flash banners appear to elevate the general level of arousal of the participants, which in turn led to making faster on-line decisions. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source]

Effects of intermodal attention on the auditory steady-state response and the event-related potential

PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY, Issue 2 2009
Katja Saupe
Abstract The aim of the present study was to simultaneously measure and compare intermodal attention effects in event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and auditory steady-state responses (ASSRs). For this purpose, 40-Hz amplitude modulated tones and a visual fixation cross were presented concurrently. By means of target detection tasks either on the sounds or on the fixation cross, participants' attention was directed to the respective modality. Attended sounds elicited a negative difference (Nd) in the ERP relative to unattended sounds. Nd was divided into an early and a late part as often observed for intramodal attention. Moreover, attention to the sounds led to a significant enhancement of the ASSR. This modulation of the ASSR by intermodal attention is demonstrated for the first time in the EEG. The present data suggest that ASSRs could provide a useful tool for the investigation of the neural dynamics of intermodal attentional processes. [source]