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Dual-task paradigms, which involve performing cognitive and motor tasks simultaneously, are commonly used to study how attentional resources are allocated and managed under varying task demands. This study aimed to investigate cognitive-motor interferences (CMI) under different levels of cognitive and motor task difficulty without instruction on task prioritization. 17 healthy young adults performed an auditory oddball task with increasing cognitive and motor (walking vs. sitting) difficulty. Cognitive and motor performances, along with P3 (P3a and P3b) brainwave components, were analysed. Increasing cognitive difficulty resulted in more errors and increased P3a amplitude, reflecting enhanced attentional demand, while P3b remained unaffected. This suggests a threshold effect on attentional resources. Motor complexity lengthened P3a and P3b latencies without affecting amplitude, indicating delayed attentional resource recruitment. Additionally, walking with the most difficult cognitive task increased cognitive error, suggesting attentional resource limits. With increased motor and cognitive complexity, CMI emerged, leading to cognitive error increase and improved gait stability without amplitude changes in P3a and P3b. Two hypotheses were proposed: motor prioritization and motor facilitation. Our study suggests managing attentional resources to balance cognitive and motor tasks rather than linearly increasing task complexity. Viewing dual tasks as a new, integrated task is proposed, supported by previous neural network integration studies. Thus, understanding how the brain organizes tasks in response to constraints is crucial for comprehending complex task execution., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 International Brain Research Organization (IBRO). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Objective. Methods that can detect brain activities accurately are crucial owing to the increasing prevalence of neurological disorders. In this context, a combination of electroencephalography (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) offers a powerful approach to understanding normal and pathological brain functions, thereby overcoming the limitations of each modality, such as susceptibility to artifacts of EEG and limited temporal resolution of fNIRS. However, challenges such as class imbalance and inter-class variability within multisubject data hinder their full potential. Approach. To address this issue, we propose a novel temporal attention fusion network (TAFN) with a custom loss function. The TAFN model incorporates attention mechanisms to its long short-term memory and temporal convolutional layers to accurately capture spatial and temporal dependencies in the EEG-fNIRS data. The custom loss function combines class weights and asymmetric loss terms to ensure the precise classification of cognitive and motor intentions, along with addressing class imbalance issues. Main results. Rigorous testing demonstrated the exceptional cross-subject accuracy of the TAFN, exceeding 99% for cognitive tasks and 97% for motor imagery (MI) tasks. Additionally, the ability of the model to detect subtle differences in epilepsy was analyzed using scalp topography in MI tasks. Significance. This study presents a technique that outperforms traditional methods for detecting high-precision brain activity with subtle differences in the associated patterns. This makes it a promising tool for applications such as epilepsy and seizure detection, in which discerning subtle pattern differences is of paramount importance., (© 2024 IOP Publishing Ltd. All rights, including for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies, are reserved.)

In everyday tasks, our focus of attention shifts seamlessly between contents in the sensory environment and internal memory representations. Yet, research has mainly considered external and internal attention in isolation. We used magnetoencephalography to compare the neural dynamics of shifting attention to visual contents within vs. between the external and internal domains. Participants performed a combined perception and working-memory task in which two sequential cues guided attention to upcoming (external) or memorized (internal) sensory information. Critically, the second cue could redirect attention to visual content within the same or alternative domain as the first cue. Multivariate decoding unveiled distinct patterns of human brain activity when shifting attention within vs. between domains. Brain activity distinguishing within- from between-domain shifts was broadly distributed and highly dynamic. Intriguingly, crossing domains did not invoke an additional stage prior to shifting attention. Alpha lateralization, a canonical marker of shifting spatial attention, showed no delay when cues redirected attention to the same vs. alternative domain. Instead, evidence suggested that neural states associated with a given domain linger and influence subsequent shifts of attention within vs. between domains. Our findings provide critical insights into the neural dynamics that govern attentional shifts between perception and working memory., Competing Interests: Competing interests statement:The authors declare no competing interest.

The current reinforcement learning framework focuses exclusively on performance, often at the expense of efficiency. In contrast, biological control achieves remarkable performance while also optimizing computational energy expenditure and decision frequency. We propose a decision-bounded Markov decision process (DB-MDP) that constrains the number of decisions and computational energy available to agents in reinforcement learning environments. Our experiments demonstrate that existing reinforcement learning algorithms struggle within this framework, leading to either failure or suboptimal performance. To address this, we introduce a biologically inspired, temporally layered architecture (TLA), enabling agents to manage computational costs through two layers with distinct timescales and energy requirements. TLA achieves optimal performance in decision-bounded environments and in continuous control environments, matching state-of-the-art performance while using a fraction of the computing cost. Compared to current reinforcement learning algorithms that solely prioritize performance, our approach significantly lowers computational energy expenditure while maintaining performance. These findings establish a benchmark and pave the way for future research on energy and time-aware control., (© 2024 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.)

Associative learning is a behavioral phenomenon in which individuals develop connections between stimuli or events based on their co-occurrence. Initially studied by Pavlov in his conditioning experiments, the fundamental principles of learning have been expanded on through the discovery of a wide range of learning phenomena. Computational models have been developed based on the concept of minimizing reward prediction errors. The Rescorla-Wagner model, in particular, is a well-known model that has greatly influenced the field of reinforcement learning. However, the simplicity of these models restricts their ability to fully explain the diverse range of behavioral phenomena associated with learning. In this study, we adopt the free energy principle, which suggests that living systems strive to minimize surprise or uncertainty under their internal models of the world. We consider the learning process as the minimization of free energy and investigate its relationship with the Rescorla-Wagner model, focusing on the informational aspects of learning, different types of surprise, and prediction errors based on beliefs and values. Furthermore, we explore how well-known behavioral phenomena such as blocking, overshadowing, and latent inhibition can be modeled within the active inference framework. We accomplish this by using the informational and novelty aspects of attention, which share similar ideas proposed by seemingly contradictory models such as Mackintosh and Pearce-Hall models. Thus, we demonstrate that the free energy principle, as a theoretical framework derived from first principles, can integrate the ideas and models of associative learning proposed based on empirical experiments and serve as a framework for a better understanding of the computational processes behind associative learning in the brain., (© 2024 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.)

When irrelevant stimuli are processed and then bound to relevant stimuli in memory, it is known as hyper-binding. Hyper-binding has been demonstrated consistently in older-aged participants, but university-aged participants do not typically show hyper-binding. This phenomenon has been attributed to older individuals having greater difficulty filtering out irrelevant information compared to younger adults. Emotions can also influence how individuals attend to and process information, and older individuals report feeling greater positive, and less negative, affect than younger adults. Low arousal positive affect is associated with greater cognitive breadth and reduced distractor suppression. Therefore, it is possible that differences in affect contribute to the differences in hyper-binding demonstrated for younger versus older adults. In four studies, we measured hyper-binding using a standard hyper-binding task and examined whether individual differences in hyper-binding could be predicted by individual differences in self-reported affect. Study 1 included an online community sample between 18 and 45 years of age. Study 2 included university undergraduate students that were tested online. Study 3 participants included university undergraduate students that were tested in the lab. Study 4 participants included an older aged sample that was tested online. Overall, there were no significant relationships between affect and hyper-binding across age samples. Surprisingly, however, significant hyper-binding was observed for all age groups and was not larger for older individuals. The results suggest that individual differences in naturally occurring affect do not meaningfully predict hyper-binding, but the prevalence of hyper-binding across all studies demonstrates it may not be unique to older adults., Competing Interests: Declarations Conflict of interests The authors declare no competing interests. Neither author has any competing interests or conflicts of interest with respect to the content of this manuscript.Ethical approval and consent to participateEthics clearance has been given by the Brock University Research Ethics Board. Participants have read the exclusion criteria listed on the online posting and consent form. They were run through the experiment after giving their informed consent to participate and were debriefed after their participation. Clearance (REB # 19–250). All procedures conformed to the standards of the Declaration Helsinki. Consent for publication This manuscript does not contain data from individual participants. Participants provided informed consent for the data to be presented in the format used here., (© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

Purpose: This cross-sectional monocentric study aims to utilize the Early Childhood Attention Battery to investigate early attention patterns in young preterm children and ascertain the extent to which their attentional abilities diverge from those of term peers., Methods: Inclusion criteria encompassed gestational age < 34 weeks, with assessments conducted between 3 and 5 years 11 months. Exclusion criteria included major brain lesions, significant motor or behavioral disorders, and intellectual functioning with IQ < 70. Preterm raw scores converted to scaled scores and percentiles. Frequency analysis compared preterm scores to norms. Non-parametric tests assessed significance between scaled scores and subgroups (age, gestational age, sex, birth weight)., Results: One hundred nineteen preterm patients were enrolled in the study between November 2016 and June 2023. Comparisons with published norms showed lower mean scores across all subtests and domains for preterm children. A notable proportion of assessments (13-40%) fell below the 5th percentile, with the dual task item in sustained attention being the highest (40%). Sex did not predict differences, except for auditory sustained and visual search subtests. Gestational age did not correlate with abnormal scores, consistent with previous studies. The prevalence of assessments below the 5th percentile highlights preterm children's vulnerability to attention issues. The test's sensitivity to attention deficits in preterm populations suggests its potential in identifying at-risk children early for tailored interventions., Conclusions: The battery effectively detects attentional deficits in preterm children. Early detection and targeted insights support tailored educational interventions. By focusing on specific attention skills, the battery guides clinicians in choosing individualized or group activities based on areas most affected., What Is Known: • Attention is often impaired in preterm children but it is not systematically investigated before school age. The ECAB is a tool specifically designed for preschool children., What Is New: • Using the ECAB we evidenced a different level of attention between pre-term and term-born children at preschool age., Competing Interests: Declarations Conflict of interest The authors declare no competing interests., (© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

The temporal resolution of adults' visual attention has been linked to the frequency of alpha-band oscillations in electroencephalogram (EEG) signal, with higher Peak Alpha Frequency (PAF) being associated with better visual temporal processing skills. However, relatively less is known about neural mechanisms underlying individual differences in the temporal resolution of visual attention in infancy. This study investigated the role of PAF in visual temporal processing in early infancy. In a sample of 6-month-old infants (n = 62) we examined the relationship between PAF extracted from resting-state EEG, and saccadic latencies in a predictive cueing task where the appearance of a reward was predicted by higher or lower frequency of two flickering objects. Results showed that higher PAF was associated with shorter saccadic latencies in a condition with higher differences between the two flickering frequencies, speaking for the involvement of PAF in visual temporal attention in early development. Additionally, we found that infants were generally faster to orient to the reward in trials where both peripheral stimuli were flickering at relatively lower frequencies, roughly corresponding to the theta frequency band. Our findings support theoretical accounts highlighting the role of PAF in visual attention processing and extend this framework to early infancy., Competing Interests: Declarations Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

The noradrenergic system is believed to support behavioral flexibility. A possible source mediating improved flexibility are α2A adrenoceptors (α2AR) in prefrontal cortex (PFC) or the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). We tested this hypothesis by stimulating α2ARs using Guanfacine during attentional set shifting in male nonhuman primates. We found that α2AR stimulation improved learning from errors and updating attention sets. Neural recordings in the ACC, dorsolateral PFC, and the striatum showed that α2AR stimulation selectively enhanced neural signaling of prediction errors in neurons of the ACC and the striatum, but not in dlPFC. This modulation was accompanied by enhanced encoding of attended target features and particularly apparent in putative fast-spiking interneurons, pointing to an interneuron mediated mechanism of α2AR action. These results reveal that α2A receptors are part of the causal chain of flexibly updating attention sets through an enhancement of outcomes and prediction error signaling in ACC and striatum., Competing Interests: Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

In dual-task (DT) situations, performance deteriorates compared with single-task situations. Such performance decrements are frequently explained with the serial scheduling of the response selection stages constituting a bottleneck. Proof of this assumption stems from the observation that response times for the second task (task 2; RT 2) increase with decreasing stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA).In this study, we investigated how the reward prospect for task 1 performance affects task 1 and task 2 processing. For that purpose, we relied on the psychological refractory period paradigm (PRP) as a chronometric tool, to determine the locus of the reward effect in the processing chain of both tasks.We obtained improved task 1 and task 2 performance; as indicated by reduced RTs in the reward compared to the no reward condition of task 1 and task 2. Furthermore, the reward effect propagated at short SOA from task 1 onto task 2, suggesting that the locus of the reward effect can be pinpointed before or at the bottleneck of task 1. Importantly, the mean reward effect on task 1 was increased compared to task 2, thus indicating that parts of the reward effect were not propagated onto task 2, therefore affecting task 1 motor processes.In Experiment 2, we tested for the locus of the effect propagation to task 2. Therefore, we implemented a difficulty manipulation of the response selection of task 2. The results indicate that the reward effect is propagated from task 1 onto the response selection stage of task 2., Competing Interests: Declarations Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests. Ethics approval The study was conducted according to the criteria set by the Declaration of Helsinki. Informed consent Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

In the motion-based stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) effect, responses are faster when the task-irrelevant stimulus motion is congruent with the response movement performance. In the present study, we tested whether smooth pursuit eye movements, related to tracking a moving object, influence motion-based SRC when present on their own or when combined with position-based SRC. We examined the motion-based SRC effect during both the response selection and response execution stages. When investigating motion-based SRC alone, participants responded with left or right movements of the single hand to the left or right movements of a centrally presented stimulus, either with their eyes fixated at the center or tracking the moving object. In the case of combined motion-based and position-based SRC, participants responded with left or right movements of the left or right hand to stimulus motion presented on the left or right side of the screen, again with eyes either fixated at the center or following the moving target. Results showed that during the response selection stage, smooth pursuit type eye movements had no effect on the motion-based SRC when the stimulus moved in the center, whereas the effect was enhanced when the stimulus presentation was lateralized. This aligns with the idea that attentional shifts differ between central and peripheral vision and that cognitive system computes various spatial maps for stimulus and response. In the case of response execution, smooth pursuit type eye movements had no effect on the motion-based SRC effect, regardless of stimulus location., Competing Interests: Declarations Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests., (© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

Symmetrical objects only project a symmetrical image onto the retina when viewed from certain angles. Previous work has investigated the ERP response to visual symmetry in frontoparallel and perspective views. When participants are attending to regularity, the ERPs are the same. When participants are attending to colour, the response to perspective symmetry is reduced. We term this reduction 'perspective cost'. We predicted that perspective cost would be lessened if the stimuli were polygons rather than dot patterns. This prediction was confirmed in a new experiment. This result suggests some stimuli may support automatic 3D interpretation better than others. However, the facilitatory effect of polygons was relatively small, and perspective cost was not eliminated. Furthermore, this study also revealed that attention to symmetry is not always sufficient to eliminate perspective cost., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare no conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Brain development is characterized by an increase in structural and functional segregation, which supports the specialization of cognitive processes within the context of network neuroscience. In this study, we investigated age-related changes in morphological segregation using individual Regional Radiomics Similarity Networks (R2SNs) constructed with a longitudinal dataset of 494 T1-weighted MR scans from 309 typically developing children aged 6.2 to 13 years at baseline. Segertation indices were defined as the relative difference in connectivity strengths within and between modules and cacluated at the global, system and local levels. Linear mixed-effect models revealed longitudinal increases in both global and system segregation indices, particularly within the limbic and dorsal attention network, and decreases within the ventral attention network. Superior performance in working memory and inhibitory control was associated with higher system-level segregation indices in default, frontoparietal, ventral attention, somatomotor and subcortical systems, and lower local segregation indices in visual network regions, regardless of age. Furthermore, gene enrichment analysis revealed correlations between age-related changes in local segregation indices and regional expression levels of genes related to developmental processes. These findings provide novel insights into typical brain developmental changes using R2SN-derived segregation indices, offering a valuable tool for understanding human brain structural and cognitive maturation., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: Shuyu Li reports financial support was provided by National Natural Science Foundation of China. Yong He reports financial support was provided by National Natural Science Foundation of China. Qiongling Li, Qi Dong, Sha Tao, Yanpei Wang, Daoyang Wang, Mingming Hu, and Zhiying Pan reports financial support was provided by National Natural Science Foundation of China. If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024. Published by Elsevier Inc.)

Background: Childhood trauma is closely tied to adult depression, but the neurobiological mechanisms remain unclear. Previous studies suggested associations between depression and large-scale brain networks such as the Ventral Attention Network (VAN) and Somatosensory Motor Network (SMN). This study hypothesized that functional connectivity (FC) within and between these networks mediates the link between childhood trauma and adult depression., Methods: The Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ) assessed developmental experiences, and the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HAMD-17) gauged depressive symptoms. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analyzed FC within and between the VAN and SMN., Results: Depression group exhibited significantly higher HAMD and CTQ scores, as well as elevated FC within the VAN and between the VAN and SMN (P < 0.05). Positive correlations were found between HAMD total score and FC within the VAN (P < 0.05, r = 0.35) and between the VAN and SMN (P < 0.05, r = 0.34), as well as with CTQ total score (P < 0.05, r = 0.27). Positive correlations were also observed between CTQ total score and FC within the VAN (P < 0.05, r = 0.31) and between the VAN and SMN (P < 0.05, r = 0.29). In the mediation model, FC within and between the VAN and SMN significantly mediated childhood trauma and depression., Limitations: The cross-sectional design limits causal inference. The sample size for different trauma types is relatively small, urging caution in generalizing findings., Conclusions: The study underscores the association between depression severity, VAN dysfunction, abnormal VAN-SMN FC, and childhood trauma. These findings contribute to understanding the neurobiological mechanisms underlying childhood trauma and depression., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

With attentional mechanisms, humans select and de-select information from the environment. But does selective attention modulate implicit learning? We tested whether the implicit acquisition of contingencies between features are modulated by the task-relevance of those features. We implemented the contingencies in a novel variant of the contextual cueing paradigm. In such a visual search task, participants could use non-spatial cues to predict target location, and then had to discriminate target shapes. In Experiment 1, the predictive feature for target location was the shape of the distractors (task-relevant). In Experiment 2, the color feature of distractors (task-irrelevant) cued target location. Results showed that participants learned to predict the target location from both the task-relevant and the task-irrelevant feature. Subsequent testing did not suggest explicit knowledge of the contingencies. For the purpose of further testing the significance of task-relevance in a cue competition situation, in Experiment 3, we provided two redundantly predictive cues, shape (task-relevant) and color (task-irrelevant) simultaneously, and subsequently tested them separately. There were no observed costs of single predictive cues when compared to compound cues. The results were not indicative of overshadowing effects, on the group and individual level, or of reciprocal overshadowing. We conclude that the acquisition of contingencies occurs independently of task-relevance and discuss this finding in the framework of the event coding literature., Competing Interests: Declarations Conflict of interest The authors declare no competing interests., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Previous studies have shown that fixations on familiar stimuli tend to be longer than on unfamiliar stimuli, theorized to be a result of retrieval of information from memory. We hypothesize that extended fixations are due to a lesser need to explore an already familiar stimulus. Participant's gaze was tracked as they tried to encode or retrieve a familiar face displayed either alone or alongside other unfamiliar faces. Regardless of the memory task (encoding\retrieval), longer fixation durations were observed when a single familiar face was presented alone, and not when presented among unfamiliar ones. Thus, fixations were not prolonged when it was possible to explore other, unfamiliar stimuli. We conclude that prolonged fixations on familiar stimuli reflect a lesser need to explore an already familiar percept. The results underscore how memory representations influence active sensing, yielding fresh insights into efficient deployment of attention resources. We conclude that fixation durations could be used in applied memory detection tests, preferably together with other measures and when the familiar stimulus is presented alone., Competing Interests: Declarations Competing interests The authors declare that they have no competing interests., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Unlike classic audio guides, intelligent audio guides can detect users' level of attention and help them regain focus. In this paper, we investigate the detection of mind wandering (MW) from eye movements in a use case with a long focus distance. We present a novel MW annotation method for combined audio-visual stimuli and collect annotated MW data for the use case of audio-guided city panorama viewing. In two studies, MW classifiers are trained and validated, which are able to successfully detect MW in a 1-s time window. In study 1 (n = 27), MW classifiers from gaze features with and without eye vergence are trained (area under the curve of at least 0.80). We then re-validate the classifier with unseen data (study 2, n = 31) that are annotated using a memory task and find a positive correlation (repeated measure correlation = 0.49, p < 0.001) between incorrect quiz answering and the percentage of time users spent mind wandering. Overall, this paper contributes significant new knowledge on the detection of MW from gaze for use cases with audio-visual stimuli., Competing Interests: Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

The complexity of natural environments requires highly flexible mechanisms for adaptive processing of single and multiple stimuli. Neuronal oscillations could be an ideal candidate for implementing such flexibility in neural systems. Here, we present a framework for structuring attention-guided processing of complex visual scenes in humans, based on multiplexing and phase coding schemes. Importantly, we suggest that the dynamic fluctuations of excitability vary rapidly in terms of magnitude, frequency and wave-form over time, i.e., they are not necessarily sinusoidal or sustained oscillations. Different elements of single objects would be processed within a single cycle (burst) of alpha activity (7-14 Hz), allowing for the formation of coherent object representations while separating multiple objects across multiple cycles. Each element of an object would be processed separately in time-expressed as different gamma band bursts (>30 Hz)-along the alpha phase. Since the processing capacity per alpha cycle is limited, an inverse relationship between object resolution and size of attentional spotlight ensures independence of the proposed mechanism from absolute object complexity. Frequency and wave-shape of those fluctuations would depend on the nature of the object that is processed and on cognitive demands. Multiple objects would further be organized along the phase of slower fluctuations (e.g., theta), potentially driven by saccades. Complex scene processing, involving covert attention and eye movements, would therefore be associated with multiple frequency changes in the alpha and lower frequency range. This framework embraces the idea of a hierarchical organization of visual processing, independent of environmental temporal dynamics., Competing Interests: The authors declare no competing financial interests., (Copyright © 2024 Bonnefond et al.)

Interactions between top-down attention and bottom-up visceral inputs are assumed to produce conscious perceptions of interoceptive states, and while each process has been independently associated with aberrant interoceptive symptomatology in psychiatric disorders, the neural substrates of this interface are unknown. We conducted a preregistered functional neuroimaging study of 46 individuals with anxiety, depression, and/or eating disorders (ADE) and 46 propensity-matched healthy comparisons (HC), comparing their neural activity across two interoceptive tasks differentially recruiting top-down or bottom-up processing within the same scan session. During an interoceptive attention task, top-down attention was voluntarily directed towards cardiorespiratory or visual signals. In contrast, during an interoceptive perturbation task, intravenous infusions of isoproterenol (a peripherally-acting beta-adrenergic receptor agonist) were administered in a double-blinded and placebo-controlled fashion to drive bottom-up cardiorespiratory sensations. Across both tasks, neural activation converged upon the insular cortex, localizing within the granular and ventral dysgranular subregions bilaterally. However, contrasting hemispheric differences emerged, with the ADE group exhibiting (relative to HCs) an asymmetric pattern of overlap in the left insula, with increased or decreased proportions of co-activated voxels within the left or right dysgranular insula, respectively. The ADE group also showed less agranular anterior insula activation during periods of bodily uncertainty (i.e. when anticipating possible isoproterenol-induced changes that never arrived). Finally, post-task changes in insula functional connectivity were associated with anxiety and depression severity. These findings confirm the dysgranular mid-insula as a key cortical interface where attention and prediction meet real-time bodily inputs, especially during heightened awareness of interoceptive states. Furthermore, the dysgranular mid-insula may indeed be a 'locus of disruption' for psychiatric disorders., Competing Interests: EA, AT, JA, Fd, SK No competing interests declared

Extensive research highlights the multifaceted benefits of active musical engagement across all ages, from childhood to the elderly. The practice of a musical instrument activates numerous brain regions, enhancing a range of neurocognitive skills. Despite accumulating evidence from various clinical populations, research on the effects of musical training in individuals with ADHD is scarce, with virtually no studies focusing on adults. This study aims to fill the gap by evaluating the impact of long-term instrumental music training on cognitive abilities in young adults (18-35 years) diagnosed with ADHD. Cognitive abilities were compared across groups of 48 musicians (experienced guitar or piano players) and 46 matched non-musicians, all confirmed to have ADHD. The assessments covered cognitive domains such as sustained attention, visuospatial processing, processing speed, graphomotor speed, working memory, auditory recall, response inhibition, and executive function. Evaluation tools included the Digit-Symbol Coding Test, Digit Span Test, Symbol Search Test, Switching Task, and Continuous Performance Test (CPT). Collectively, the results indicated a notable enhancement in cognitive performance in the musician group compared to the non-musician group, including in functions central to the disorder, such as sustained attention and impulse control. Musicians scored higher on the Digit-Symbol Coding, Digit Span, and Symbol Search tests, showed lower error rates and greater consistency in reaction times in the Switching Task, and had fewer commission errors in the CPT. The findings support the integration of specialized musical training in therapeutic and support programs for ADHD, suggesting benefits that may extend into adulthood., Competing Interests: Declarations Conflict of interest The authors declare no competing interests. Ethical approval This study was approved by the College Review Board (i.e., ethics committee). All procedures performed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed consent Informed consent was obtained from all individual adult participants included in the study (no children participated). Prior publication The existing dataset has not been previously utilized in any published or forthcoming manuscripts. Artificial intelligence In the course of preparing this manuscript, ChatGPT-4 was utilized exclusively for English text editing and proofreading purposes. It was not utilized for any other aspect of the research, including content generation, data analysis, or hypothesis formulation. The primary content, methodology, and scientific contributions presented in this work are the sole responsibility of the author., (© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

The sudden appearance of a visual distractor shortly before saccade initiation can capture spatial attention and modulate the saccade trajectory in spite of the ongoing execution of the initial plan to shift gaze straight to the saccade target. To elucidate the neural correlates underlying these curved saccades, we recorded from single neurons in the frontal eye field of two male rhesus monkeys shifting gaze to a target while a distractor with the same eccentricity appeared either left or right of the target at various delays after target presentation. We found that the population level of presaccadic activity of neurons representing the distractor location encoded the direction of the saccade trajectory. Stronger activity occurred when saccades curved toward the distractor, and weaker when saccades curved away. This relationship held whether the distractor was ipsilateral or contralateral to the recorded neurons. Meanwhile, visually responsive neurons showed asymmetrical patterns of excitatory responses that varied with the location of the distractor and the duration of distractor processing relating to attentional capture and distractor inhibition. During earlier distractor processing, neurons encoded curvature toward the distractor. During later distractor processing, neurons encoded curvature away from the distractor. This was observed when saccades curved away from distractors contralateral to the recording site and when saccades curved toward distractors ipsilateral to the recording site. These findings indicate that saccadic motor planning involves dynamic push-pull hemispheric interactions producing attraction or repulsion for potential but unselected saccade targets., Competing Interests: The authors declare no competing financial interests., (Copyright © 2024 the authors.)

Goal-directed visual attention is a fundamental cognitive process that enables animals to selectively focus on specific regions of the visual field while filtering out irrelevant information. However, given the domain specificity of social behaviors, it remains unclear whether attention to faces versus nonfaces recruits different neurocognitive processes. In this study, we simultaneously recorded activity from temporal and frontal nodes of the attention network while macaques performed a goal-directed visual search task. V4 and inferotemporal (IT) visual category-selective units, selected during cue presentation, discriminated fixations on targets and distractors during the search but were differentially engaged by face and house targets. V4 and IT category-selective units also encoded fixation transitions and search dynamics. Compared with distractors, fixations on targets reduced spike-LFP coherence within the temporal cortex. Importantly, target-induced desynchronization between the temporal and prefrontal cortices was only evident for face targets, suggesting that attention to faces differentially engaged the prefrontal cortex. We further revealed bidirectional theta influence between the temporal and prefrontal cortices using Granger causality, which was again disproportionate for faces. Finally, we showed that the search became more efficient with increasing target-induced desynchronization. Together, our results suggest domain specificity for attending to faces and an intricate interplay between visual attention and social processing neural networks., Competing Interests: The authors declare no competing financial interests., (Copyright © 2024 the authors.)

Hypervigilance involves increased attentional scanning of the environment to facilitate the detection of possible threats. Accordingly, this state is mostly bound to external attention and as a corollary, it might be detrimental to internal attention and further affect attentional balance defined as the ability to switch dynamically between these two domains. In the current study, we aimed to address this question and induced hypervigilance in 49 healthy participants through the presentation of a task-unrelated aversive sound while they performed the switching attention task (SAT), which was previously devised to study attentional balance. The skin conductance response results, as well as subjective sound ratings, confirmed that the hypervigilance manipulation was successful. At the behavioral level, hypervigilance led to a more symmetrical balance between internal and external attention compared to the control and neutral conditions, where it was asymmetrical, replicating previous studies. Moreover, using a drift diffusion model, we found that hypervigilance reduced the drift rate for internal repetition trials, suggesting that hypervigilance possibly caused an impaired shielding of internal attention., Competing Interests: Declarations Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests., (© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

Language comprehension requires semantic processing of individual words and their context within a sentence. Well-characterized event-related potential (ERP) components (the N400 and late positivity component (LPC/P600)) provide neuromarkers of semantic processing, and are robustly evoked when semantic errors are introduced into sentences. These measures are useful for evaluating semantic processing in clinical populations, but it is not known whether they can be evoked in more severe neurodevelopmental disorders where explicit attention to the sentence inputs cannot be objectively assessed (i.e., when sentences are passively listened to). We evaluated whether N400 and LPC/P600 could be detected in adolescents who were explicitly ignoring sentence inputs. Specifically, it was asked whether explicit attention to spoken inputs was required for semantic processing, or if a degree of automatic processing occurs when the focus of attention is directed elsewhere? High-density ERPs were acquired from twenty-two adolescents (12-17 years), under two experimental conditions: 1. individuals actively determined whether the final word in a sentence was congruent or incongruent with sentence context, or 2. passively listened to background sentences while watching a video. When sentences were ignored, N400 and LPC/P600 were robustly evoked to semantic errors, albeit with reduced amplitudes and protracted/delayed latencies. Statistically distinct topographic distributions during passive versus active paradigms pointed to distinct generator configurations for semantic processing as a function of attention. Covert semantic processing continues in neurotypical adolescents when explicit attention is withdrawn from sentence inputs. As such, this approach could be used to objectively investigate semantic processing in populations with communication deficits., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Auditory spatial attention detection (ASAD) aims to decipher the spatial locus of a listener's selective auditory attention from electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. However, current models may exhibit deficiencies in EEG feature extraction, leading to overfitting on small datasets or a decline in EEG discriminability. Furthermore, they often neglect topological relationships between EEG channels and, consequently, brain connectivities. Although graph-based EEG modeling has been employed in ASAD, effectively incorporating both local and global connectivities remains a great challenge. To address these limitations, we propose a new ASAD model. First, time-frequency feature fusion provides a more precise and discriminative EEG representation. Second, EEG segments are treated as graphs, and the graph convolution and global attention mechanism are leveraged to capture local and global brain connections, respectively. A series of experiments are conducted in a leave-trials-out cross-validation manner. On the MAD-EEG and KUL datasets, the accuracies of the proposed model are more than 9% and 3% higher than those of the corresponding state-of-the-art models, respectively, while the accuracy of the proposed model on the SNHL dataset is roughly comparable to that of the state-of-the-art model. EEG time-frequency feature fusion proves to be indispensable in the proposed model. EEG electrodes over the frontal cortex are most important for ASAD tasks, followed by those over the temporal lobe. Additionally, the proposed model performs well even on small datasets. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the neural encoding related to human hearing and attention, with potential applications in neuro-steered hearing devices., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 International Brain Research Organization (IBRO). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Background: Patients with migraine often experience not only headache pain but also cognitive dysfunction, particularly in attention, which is frequently overlooked in both diagnosis and treatment. The influence of these attentional deficits on the pain-related clinical characteristics of migraine remains poorly understood, and clarifying this relationship could improve care strategies., Methods: This study included 52 patients with migraine and 34 healthy controls. We employed the Attentional Network Test for Interactions and Vigilance-Executive and Arousal Components paradigm, combined with electroencephalography, to assess attentional deficits in patients with migraine, with an emphasis on phasic alerting, orienting, executive control, executive vigilance, and arousal vigilance. An extreme gradient boosting binary classifier was trained on features showing group differences to distinguish patients with migraine from healthy controls. Moreover, an extreme gradient boosting regression model was developed to predict clinical characteristics of patients with migraine using their attentional deficit features., Results: For general performance, patients with migraine presented a larger inverse efficiency score, a higher prestimulus beta-band power spectral density and a lower gamma-band event-related synchronization at Cz electrode, and stronger high alpha-band activity at the primary visual cortex, compared to healthy controls. Although no behavior differences in three basic attentional networks were found, patients showed magnified N1 amplitude and prolonged latency of P2 for phasic alerting-trials as well as an increased orienting evoked-P1 amplitude. For vigilance function, improvements in the hit rate of executive vigilance-trials were exhibited in controls but not in patients. Besides, patients with migraine exhibited longer reaction time as well as larger variability in arousal vigilance-trials than controls. The binary classifier developed by such attentional deficit features achieved an F1 score of 0.762 and an accuracy of 0.779 in distinguishing patients with migraine from healthy controls. Crucially, the predicted value available from the regression model involving attentional deficit features significantly correlated with the real value for the frequency of headache., Conclusions: Patients with migraine demonstrated significant attentional deficits, which can be used to differentiate migraine patients from healthy populations and to predict clinical characteristics. These findings highlight the need to address cognitive dysfunction, particularly attentional deficits, in the clinical management of migraine., Competing Interests: Declarations Ethics approval and consent to participate The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Chinese PLA General Hospital in accordance with the ethical principles of the Declaration of Helsinki (2023 − 460). Consent for publication Not applicable. Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Objective: Memory and affective processing were compared in young adults with a remote mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), to healthy younger and older adults. We evaluated memory performance when encoding was done under multi-tasking (divided attention) conditions, likely to exacerbate cognitive and psychological symptoms in mTBI., Methods: Participants studied pairs of unrelated words under either full or divided attention conditions. Memory for single words (item memory) and for pairs of words (associative memory) was then assessed in sequential independent recognition tests, under full attention., Results: Associative memory was poorer than item memory, and worse when encoding was done under divided than full attention. The decline in recognition accuracy from full to divided attention conditions on the associative memory test was significantly greater in mTBI compared to young adults and was similar in magnitude to that observed in older adults under full attention. Self-reported mental and total fatigue increased significantly as performance on the memory tests, following the divided attention condition, decreased, but only in the mTBI group., Conclusions: Results show lingering memory deficits, and suggest that cognitive tasks may be experienced as psychologically more demanding in those with a mTBI, even months or years after injury.

The size of the pupils reflects directly the balance of different branches of the autonomic nervous system. This measure is inexpensive, non-invasive, and has provided invaluable insights on a wide range of mental processes, from attention to emotion and executive functions. Two outstanding limitations of current pupillometry research are the lack of consensus in the analytical approaches, which vary wildly across research groups and disciplines, and the fact that, unlike other neuroimaging techniques, pupillometry lacks the dimensionality to shed light on the different sources of the observed effects. In other words, pupillometry provides an integrated readout of several distinct networks, but it is unclear whether each has a specific fingerprint, stemming from its function or physiological substrate. Here we show that phasic changes in pupil size are inherently low-dimensional, with modes that are highly consistent across behavioral tasks of very different nature, suggesting that these changes occur along pupillary manifolds that are highly constrained by the underlying physiological structures rather than functions. These results provide not only a unified approach to analyze pupillary data, but also the opportunity for physiology and psychology to refer to the same processes by tracing the sources of the reported changes in pupil size in the underlying biology., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Behavioral studies suggest that immersion in nature improves affect and executive attention. However, the neural mechanisms underlying these benefits remain unclear. This randomized controlled trial (N = 92) explored differences in self-reported affect and in frontal midline theta (FMθ), a neural oscillation linked to executive attention, between a 40-min, low-intensity nature walk and an urban walk of comparable time and distance-controlling for ambient temperature, humidity, elevation change, walking pace, heart rate, calories burned, and moving time between the two groups. While affect improved for both groups, the nature walkers showed a significantly greater boost in positive affect than the urban walkers. Electroencephalography (EEG) data revealed significantly greater FMθ activity following the urban walk compared to the nature walk, suggesting that the urban walk placed higher demands on executive attention. In contrast, the nature walk allowed executive attention to rest, as indicated by the lower FMθ activity observed after the walk. This study suggests that changes in FMθ may be a potential neural mechanism underlying the attentional strain of urban environments in contrast to the attentional rest in nature., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Successful behavior depends on the attentional state and other factors related to decision-making, which may modulate neuronal activity differently. Here, we investigated whether attentional state and behavioral outcome (i.e., whether a target is detected or missed) are distinguishable using the power and phase of local field potential recorded bilaterally from area V4 of two male rhesus monkeys performing a cued visual attention task. To link each trial's outcome to pairwise measures of attention that are typically averaged across trials, we used several methods to obtain single-trial estimates of spike count correlation and phase consistency. Surprisingly, while attentional location was best discriminated using gamma and high-gamma power, behavioral outcome was best discriminated by alpha power and steady-state visually evoked potential. Power outperformed absolute phase in attentional/behavioral discriminability, although single-trial gamma phase consistency provided reasonably high attentional discriminability. Our results suggest a dissociation between the neuronal mechanisms that regulate attentional focus and behavioral outcome., Competing Interests: The authors declare no competing financial interests., (Copyright © 2024 Prakash et al.)

Study Objectives: Perimenopausal insomnia (PMI) is associated with observable performance impairments in visual search tasks. This study examines how various cognitive processing stages contribute to search performance delays in PMI compared to healthy controls (HCs)., Methods: We recruited 76 participants diagnosed with PMI and 63 HCs. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded as participants engaged in a visual search task, reporting the orientation of a color popout target within an array of ellipses. We analyzed group differences in behavioral performance and ERP components across cognitive processing stages., Results: Compared to HCs, PMI patients exhibited behavioral response delays, although accuracy was not different between groups. Electrophysiological analyses revealed group differences across several ERP components. Firstly, the N1 component's amplitude increased bilaterally, suggesting enhanced visual sensory processing. Secondly, a slower and smaller N2pc indicated reduced attentional orienting. Thirdly, a decreased sustained posterior-contralateral negativity amplitude pointed to deficits in target discrimination. Fourthly, an increased amplitude of the stimulus-locked lateralized readiness potential (LRP), with unchanged latency, suggested heightened neural inputs for maintaining motor initiation speed. Fifthly, prolonged response-locked LRP latency indicated slower motor execution. Finally, these changes in ERP components, along with significant correlations between LRP components and insomnia symptoms, suggest potential neural biomarkers for PMI., Conclusions: Our findings provide high-temporal-resolution insights into the neurocognitive disruptions associated with PMI, highlighting how sleep disturbances affect cognitive processing in visual tasks. These insights enhance our understanding of PMI and contribute to discussions on neural mechanisms driving behavioral performance in various conditions., (© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Sleep Research Society. All rights reserved. For commercial re-use, please contact reprints@oup.com for reprints and translation rights for reprints. All other permissions can be obtained through our RightsLink service via the Permissions link on the article page on our site—for further information please contact journals.permissions@oup.com.)

Visual working memory (VWM) plays a crucial role in temporarily maintaining and manipulating visual information. Retro-cue benefit (RCB) refers to the enhancement of memory performance when attention is directed toward a subset of items in VWM after their initial encoding. Our recent electroencephalogram (EEG) studies indicate that cue validity affects the mechanisms underlying RCB formation. However, previous research has not thoroughly examined whether these mechanisms differ between completely valid and highly valid cue conditions. This study investigates the consistency of RCB mechanisms under conditions of complete (100%) and high (80%) retro-cue validity. We manipulated retro-cue validity and examined cognitive processing mechanisms under different validity conditions using EEG. Specifically, we focused on the N2pc component, which reflects attentional resource allocation, and the contralateral delay activity (CDA) component, which reflects the quantity of information retained in VWM. The results, encompassing both behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) findings, show that participants in both the 100% and 80% cue validity conditions exhibit robust RCB. Notably, the degree of RCB remains consistent across these conditions, indicating that participants utilize retro-cues to enhance VWM performance to the same extent. In the 80% cue validity condition, a significant retro-cue cost (RCC) was observed, indicating that participants selectively discarded uncued items from VWM. In invalid trials, response accuracy drops to chance levels, supporting the removal hypothesis. ERP results reveal that attentional resource allocation (N2pc) and the quantity of retained information (CDA) remain uniform across cue validity conditions. The mechanism responsible for RCB formation appears to involve an all-or-nothing process of discarding uncued information rather than a flexible resource allocation strategy. This study provides insights into attention allocation and information-processing mechanisms in VWM, suggesting that conclusions drawn from tasks with completely valid retro-cues can be integrated with findings from highly valid cue tasks. These findings also illuminate the flexibility of internal attentional resource allocation during RCB formation and contribute to our understanding of attention processes in VWM., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Recognition of sadness from facial expressions is associated with empathic responses. In this study, we devised an emotional probabilistic reward task (PRT) to facilitate sadness recognition and tested its effects on attentional and empathic responses to others in distress. During the emotional PRT, healthy participants were asked to discriminate between facial expressions subtly expressing sadness or anger. Reward feedback for correct sadness and anger recognition was provided, with different probabilities between the training (70% vs. 30%) and control groups (50% vs. 50%). Subsequently, participants performed a visual dot-probe task involving facial expressions of sadness, anger, fear, and happiness. They also completed an empathy rating task while viewing short video clips depicting people experiencing distressing or neutral events. The results showed that the training group developed greater recognition bias for sadness than the control group. Within the training group, sad recognition bias was positively associated with subsequent attentional orienting to sad faces and empathic concern towards distressed others. These findings suggest that the emotional PRT holds promise for modifying cognitive and emotional processes that are associated with empathy for others., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2024 Lee, Kim. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

Purpose: When vowel formants are externally perturbed, speakers change their production to oppose that perturbation both during the ongoing production (compensation) and in future productions (adaptation). To date, attempts to explain the large variability across individuals in these responses have focused on trait-based characteristics such as auditory acuity, but evidence from other motor domains suggests that attention may modulate the motor response to sensory perturbations. Here, we test the extent to which divided attention impacts sensorimotor control for supralaryngeal articulation., Method: Neurobiologically healthy speakers were exposed to random (Experiment 1) or consistent (Experiment 2) real-time auditory perturbation of vowel formants to measure online compensation and trial-to-trial adaptation, respectively. In both experiments, participants completed two conditions: one with a simultaneous visual distractor task to divide attention and one without this secondary task., Results: Divided visual attention slightly reduced online compensation, but only starting > 300 ms after vowel onset, well beyond the typical duration of vowels in speech. Divided attention had no effect on adaptation., Conclusions: The results from both experiments suggest that the use of sensory feedback in typical speech motor control is a largely automatic process unaffected by divided visual attention, suggesting that the source of cross-speaker variability in response to formant perturbations likely lies within the speech production system rather than in higher-level cognitive processes. Methodologically, these results suggest that compensation for formant perturbations should be measured prior to 300 ms after vowel onset to avoid any potential impact of attention or other higher-order cognitive factors.

Background: Neurocognitive impairment is one of the prominent manifestations of major depressive disorder (MDD). Childhood trauma enhances vulnerability to developing MDD and contributes to neurocognitive dysfunctions. However, the distinct impacts of different types of childhood trauma on neurocognitive processes in MDD remain unclear., Methods: This study comprised 186 individuals diagnosed with MDD and 268 healthy controls. Childhood trauma was evaluated using the 28-item Childhood Trauma Questionnaire-Short Form. Neurocognitive abilities, encompassing sustained attention, vigilance, visual memory, and executive functioning, were measured by the Cambridge Neuropsychological Testing Automated Battery., Results: Multivariable linear regressions revealed that childhood trauma and MDD diagnosis were independently associated with neurocognitive impairment. Physical neglect was associated with impaired visual memory and working memory. MDD diagnosis is associated with working memory and planning. Interactive analysis revealed that physical/sexual abuse was associated with a high level of vigilance and that emotional neglect was linked with better performance on cognitive flexibility in MDD patients. Furthermore, childhood emotional abuse, physical abuse, and emotional neglect were revealed to be risk factors for developing early-onset, chronic depressive episodes., Conclusion: Thus, specific associations between various childhood traumas and cognitive development in depression are complex phenomena that need further study., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Key event-related potentials (ERPs) of perceptual decision-making such as centroparietal positivity (CPP) elucidate how evidence is accumulated toward a given choice. Furthermore, this accumulation can be impacted by visual target selection signals such as the N2 contralateral (N2c). How these underlying neural mechanisms of perceptual decision-making are influenced by the spatial congruence of distractors relative to target stimuli remains unclear. Here, we used electroencephalography (EEG) in humans of both sexes to investigate the effect of distractor spatial congruency (same vs different hemifield relative to targets) on perceptual decision-making. We confirmed that responses for perceptual decisions were slower for spatially incongruent versus congruent distractors of high salience. Similarly, markers of target selection (N2c peak amplitude) and evidence accumulation (CPP slope) were found to be lower when distractors were spatially incongruent versus congruent. To evaluate the effects of congruency further, we applied drift diffusion modeling to participant responses, which showed that larger amplitudes of both ERPs were correlated with shorter nondecision times when considering the effect of congruency. The modeling also suggested that congruency's effect on behavior occurred prior to and during evidence accumulation when considering the effects of the N2c peak and CPP slope. These findings point to spatially incongruent distractors, relative to congruent distractors, influencing decisions as early as the initial sensory processing phase and then continuing to exert an effect as evidence is accumulated throughout the decision-making process. Overall, our findings highlight how key electrophysiological signals of perceptual decision-making are influenced by the spatial congruence of target and distractor., Competing Interests: The authors declare no competing financial interests., (Copyright © 2024 the authors.)

Visual working memory has a limited maximum capacity, which can be larger if stimuli are presented bilaterally vs. unilaterally. However, the neuronal mechanisms underlying this bilateral field advantage are not known. Visual working memory capacity is predicted by oscillatory delay-period activity, specifically, by a decrease in alpha (8 to 12 Hz) band amplitudes in posterior brain regions reflecting attentional deployment and related shifts in excitation, as well as a concurrent increase of prefrontal oscillation amplitudes and interareal synchronization in multiple frequencies reflecting active maintenance of information. Here, we asked whether posterior alpha suppression or prefrontal oscillation enhancement explains the bilateral field advantage. We recorded brain activity with high-density electroencephalography, while subjects (n = 26, 14 males) performed a visual working memory task with uni- and bilateral visual stimuli. The bilateral field advantage was associated with early suppression of low-alpha (6 to 10 Hz) and alpha-beta (10 to 17 Hz) band amplitudes, and a subsequent alpha-beta amplitude increase, which, along with a concurrent load-dependent interareal synchronization in the high-alpha band (10 to 15 Hz), correlated with hit rates and reaction times and thus predicted higher maximum capacities in bilateral than unilateral visual working memory. These results demonstrate that the electrophysiological basis of the bilateral field advantage in visual working memory is both in the changes in attentional deployment and enhanced interareal integration., (© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press.)

Contextual interference (CI) enhances learning by practicing motor tasks in a random order rather than a blocked order. One hypothesis suggests that the benefits arise from enhanced early perceptual/attentional processes, while another posits that better learning is due to highly activated mnemonic processes. We used high-density electroencephalography in a multi-scale analysis approach, including topographic analyses, source estimations, and functional connectivity, to examine the intertwined dynamics of attentional and mnemonic processes within short time windows. We recorded scalp activity from 35 participants as they performed an aiming task at three different distances, under both random and blocked conditions using a crossover design. Our results showed that topographies associated with processes related to perception/attention (N1, P3a) and working memory (P3b) were more pronounced in the random condition. Source estimation analyses supported these findings, revealing greater involvement of the perceptual ventral pathway, anterior cingulate and parietal cortices, along with increased functional connectivity in ventral alpha and frontoparietal theta band networks during random practice. Our results suggest that CI is driven, in the random compared to the blocked condition, by enhanced specific processes such as perceptual, attentional, and working memory processes, as well as large-scale functional networks sustaining more general attentional and executive processes., (© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press.)

Selective attention relies on neural mechanisms that facilitate processing of behaviorally relevant sensory information while suppressing irrelevant information, consistently linked to alpha-band oscillations in human M/EEG studies. We analyzed cortical alpha responses from intracranial electrodes implanted in eight epilepsy patients, who performed a visual spatial attention task. Electrocorticographic data revealed a spatiotemporal dissociation between attention-modulated alpha desynchronization, associated with the enhancement of sensory processing, and alpha synchronization, associated with the suppression of sensory processing, during the cue-target interval. Dorsal intraparietal areas contralateral to the attended hemifield primarily exhibited a delayed and sustained alpha desynchronization, while ventrolateral extrastriatal areas ipsilateral to the attended hemifield primarily exhibited an earlier and sustained alpha synchronization. Analyses of cross-frequency coupling between alpha phase and broadband high-frequency activity (HFA) further revealed cross-frequency interactions along the visual hierarchy contralateral to the attended locations. Directionality analyses indicate that alpha phase in early and extrastriatal visual areas modulated HFA power in downstream visual areas, thus potentially facilitating the feedforward processing of an upcoming, spatially predictable target. In contrast, in areas ipsilateral to the attended locations, HFA power modulated local alpha phase in early and extrastriatal visual areas, with suppressed interareal interactions, potentially attenuating the processing of distractors. Our findings reveal divergent alpha-mediated neural mechanisms underlying target enhancement and distractor suppression during the deployment of spatial attention, reflecting enhanced functional connectivity at attended locations, while suppressed functional connectivity at unattended locations. The collective dynamics of these alpha-mediated neural mechanisms play complementary roles in the efficient gating of sensory information., Competing Interests: Competing interests statement:The authors declare no competing interest.

This study investigated the association between cognitive function and facial emotion recognition (FER) in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) and mild cognitive impairment (PD-MCI). We enrolled 126 participants from Taiwan, including 63 patients with idiopathic PD and 63 matched healthy controls. The PD group was divided into two groups: those with normal cognitive function (PD-NC) and those with MCI (PD-MCI). Participants underwent a modality emotion recognition test and comprehensive cognitive assessment. Our findings reveal that patients with PD-MCI exhibit significantly impaired FER, especially in recognizing "disgust," compared with patients with PD-NC and healthy adults (P = .001). This deficit correlates with executive function, attention, memory, and visuospatial abilities. Attention mediates the relationship between executive function and "disgust" FER. The findings highlight how patients with PD-MCI are specifically challenged when recognizing "disgust" and suggest that cognitive training focusing on cognitive flexibility and attention may improve their FER abilities. This study contributes to our understanding of the nuanced relationship between cognitive dysfunction and FER in patients with PD-MCI, emphasizing the need for targeted interventions., (© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press.)

Mind wandering (MW) is the intentional or unintentional experience of attending to internal task-unrelated thoughts while being occupied with an external task. Even though maintaining task focus is assumed to require executive functions (EF), it is not clear how and to what extent MW and EF interact. Research has found that activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is associated with EF and MW. To understand the causal role of the DLPFC in relation to MW and EF, researchers have turned to non-invasive brain stimulation. Thus far, most studies have used transcranial direct current stimulation, but the results have been inconclusive. To further elucidate the relationship between the DLPFC, EF and MW, we conducted a pre-registered, sham-controlled, triple-blinded within-subject experiment by combining intermittent theta burst stimulation (iTBS) interleaved with a recently developed MW-EF task. In contrast to our expectations, participants reported significantly more MW following real iTBS as compared to sham stimulation. However, at the same time, psychomotor precision and EF improved, indicating that participants were able to engage in resource-intensive MW while simultaneously performing well on the task. We argue that iTBS enhanced the underlying executive resources that could be used to increase both MW and task performance in line with the resource-control view of MW. This finding opens exciting avenues for studying the complex interplay between MW and EF and provides empirical support for the utility of iTBS in improving executive performance during a demanding cognitive task., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

Background: The purpose of this study was to identify patterns of structural disconnection and multivariate lesion-behaviour relationships associated with post-stroke deficits across six commonly impacted cognitive domains: executive function, language, memory, numerical processing, praxis, and visuospatial attention., Methods: Stroke survivors (n = 593) completed a brief domain-specific cognitive assessment (the Oxford Cognitive Screen (OCS)) during acute hospitalisation. Network-level and multivariate (sparce canonical correlation) lesion mapping analyses were conducted to identify focal neural correlates and distributed patterns of structural disconnection associated with impairment on each of the 16 OCS measures., Results: Network-level and multivariate lesion mapping analyses identified significant correlates for 12/16 and 10/16 OCS measures, respectively which were largely consistent with correlates reported in past work. Language impairments were reliably localised to network- and voxel-level correlates centred in left fronto-temporal regions. Memory impairments were associated with disconnection in a large network of left hemisphere regions. Number processing deficits were associated with damage to voxels centred in the left insular/opercular cortex, as well as disconnection within the surrounding white matter tracts. Within the domain of attention, different subtypes of visuospatial neglect were linked to distinct but partially overlapping patterns of disconnection and voxel-level damage. Praxis impairment was not linked to any voxel-level regions but was significantly associated with disconnection within the left hemisphere dorsal attention network., Conclusion: These results highlight the utility of routine, domain-specific cognitive assessment and imaging data for theoretically-driven lesion mapping analyses, while providing novel insight into the complex anatomical correlates of common and debilitating post-stroke cognitive impairments., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

Despite increasing recognition of the significance of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), the long-term cognitive consequences of the injury remain unclear. More sensitive measures that can detect subtle cognitive changes and consideration of individual variability are needed to properly characterise cognitive outcomes following mTBI. Here, we used complex behavioural tasks, individual differences approaches, and electrophysiology to investigate the long-term cognitive effects of a history of mTBI. In Experiment 1, participants with self-reported mTBI history (n=82) showed poorer verbal working memory performance on the operation span task compared to control participants (n=88), but there were no group differences in visual working memory, multitasking, cognitive flexibility, attentional control, visuospatial ability, or information processing speed. Individual differences analyses revealed that time since injury and presence of memory loss predicted visual working memory capacity and visuospatial ability, respectively, in those with mTBI history. In Experiment 2, participants with mTBI history (n=20) again demonstrated poorer verbal working memory on the operation span task compared to control participants (n=38), but no group differences were revealed on a visuospatial complex span task or simpler visual working memory measures. We also explored the electrophysiological indices of visual working memory using EEG during a change detection task. No differences were observed in early sensory event-related potentials (P1, N1) or the later negative slow wave associated with visual working memory capacity. Together, these findings suggest that mTBI history may be associated with a lasting, isolated disruption in the subsystem underlying verbal working memory storage. The results emphasise the importance of sensitive cognitive measures and accounting for individual variability in injury characteristics when assessing mTBI outcomes., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors have no competing interests to declare., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

In natural language processing, document-level relation extraction is a complex task that aims to predict the relationships among entities by capturing contextual interactions from an unstructured document. Existing graph- and transformer-based models capture long-range relational facts across sentences. However, they still cannot fully exploit the semantic information from multiple interactive sentences, resulting in the exclusion of influential sentences for related entities. To address this problem, a novel Semantic-guided Attention and Adaptively Gated (SAAG) model is developed for document-level relation extraction. First, a semantic-guided attention module is designed to guide sentence representation by assigning different attention scores to different words. The multihead attention mechanism is then used to capture the attention of different subspaces further to generate a document context representation. Finally, the SAAG model exploits the semantic information by leveraging a gating mechanism that can dynamically distinguish between local and global contexts. The experimental results demonstrate that the SAAG model outperforms previous models on two public datasets., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

The neural mechanisms that willfully direct attention to specific locations in space are closely related to those for generating targeting eye movements (saccades). However, the degree to which the voluntary deployment of attention to a location necessarily activates a corresponding saccade plan remains unclear. One problem is that attention and saccades are both automatically driven by salient sensory events; another is that the underlying processes unfold within tens of milliseconds only. Here, we use an urgent task design to resolve the evolution of a visuomotor choice on a moment-by-moment basis while independently controlling the endogenous (goal-driven) and exogenous (salience-driven) contributions to performance. Human participants saw a peripheral cue and, depending on its color, either looked at it (prosaccade) or looked at a diametrically opposite, uninformative non-cue (antisaccade). By varying the luminance of the stimuli, the exogenous contributions could be cleanly dissociated from the endogenous process guiding the choice over time. According to the measured time courses, generating a correct antisaccade requires about 30 ms more processing time than generating a correct prosaccade based on the same perceptual signal. The results indicate that saccade plans elaborated during fixation are biased toward the location where attention is endogenously deployed, but the coupling is weak and can be willfully overridden very rapidly., Competing Interests: AG, TS No competing interests declared, ES Reviewing editor, eLife, (© 2024, Goldstein et al.)

Audio-visual media possesses a remarkable ability to synchronise audiences' neural, behavioural, and physiological responses. This synchronisation is considered to reflect some dimension of collective attention or engagement with the stimulus. But what is it about these stimuli that drives such strong engagement? There are several properties of media stimuli which may lead to synchronous audience response: from low-level audio-visual features, to the story itself. Here, we present a study which separates low-level features from narrative by presenting participants with the same content but in separate modalities. In this way, the presentations shared no low-level features, but participants experienced the same narrative. We show that synchrony in participants' heart rate can be driven by the narrative information alone. We computed both visual and auditory perceptual saliency for the content and found that narrative was approximately 10 times as predictive of heart rate as low-level saliency, but that low-level audio-visual saliency has a small additive effect towards heart rate. Further, heart rate synchrony was related to a separate cohorts' continuous ratings of immersion, and that synchrony is likely to be higher at moments of increased narrative importance. Our findings demonstrate that high-level narrative dominates in the alignment of physiology across viewers., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

This study assesses whether the frequency of violent video game play is associated with attentional desensitization or sensitization to images depicting violence or nonviolent interpersonal conflict. Two hundred and thirty-two participants reported their three most frequently played video games and the amount of time each game was played in a typical week. Next, they completed an assessment of emotion-induced blindness, which refers to a reduction in the correct identification of a neutral target image when it follows an emotionally charged distractor image. The primary findings showed that weekly violent video game play was negatively associated with target identification following nonviolent interpersonal conflict images, but not violent images. Findings are discussed in terms of the saliency of threatening images and attentional processing., (© 2024 Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

Background: It is still not fully explained what kind of cognitive sources the methods used in the assessment of listening effort are more sensitive to and how these measurement results are related to each other. The aim of the study is to ascertain which neural resources crucial for listening effort are most sensitive to objective measurement methods using differently degraded speech stimuli., Methods: A total of 49 individuals between the ages of 19 and 34 with normal hearing participated in the study. In the first stage, simultaneous pupillometry, electroencephalogram (EEG), and single-task paradigm reaction time (RT) measurements were made during the challenging listening and repetition task with noise-vocoded speech. Two speech reception thresholds (SRT) (50% and 80%) for two vocoding conditions (16 and 6 channels) were collected, resulting in 4 conditions. In the second stage, the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT) and the test of attention in listening (TAIL) were applied. Stepwise linear regression analyses were conducted to examine the predictors of listening effort measurements., Results: A significant difference was found between 6 and 16 channel stimuli in both pupil dilation change and EEG alpha band power change. In the hardest listening condition, whereas RAVLT scores are significant predictors of pupil dilation change, TAIL scores are significant predictors of EEG alpha power. As the stimulus difficulty decreased, the factors that predicted both EEG and pupillometry results decreased. In the single-task paradigm, a significant regression model could not be obtained at all four difficulty levels., Conclusion: As a result of the study, it was found that the pupil dilation change was more sensitive to auditory memory skills and the EEG alpha power change was more sensitive to auditory attention skills. To our knowledge, this study is the first to investigate the sensitivity of different listening effort measurement methods to auditory cognitive skills., (© 2024 The Author(s). Brain and Behavior published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

Objective: To describe associations between executive function (EF) domains (attentional control, information processing, cognitive flexibility, and goal setting) and concurrent math computation performance at age 7 and 13 years in children born <30 weeks' gestation or weighing <1,250 g, and second, to examine the impact of 7-year EF on math performance at 13 years., Method: In a prospective, longitudinal cohort of children born <30 weeks' gestation or with a birthweight <1,250 g, assessment of EF and math performance was undertaken at 7 (n = 187) and 13 years (n = 174). Linear regression models were used to describe associations between EF domains with math performance at both time points, as well as to examine the impact of EF at 7 years on math performance at 13 years., Results: At 7 and 13 years, all EF domains were positively and strongly associated with concurrent math performance (β = 11.35, 95% CI [9.28, 13.41] to β = 13.79, 95% CI [11.59, 15.98]). All EF domains at age 7 years were positively associated with math performance at 13 years, with the strongest associations observed for cognitive flexibility (β = 10.79 [8.64, 12.94]) and goal setting (β = 10.37 [8.08, 12.67])., Conclusions: This study provides evidence that EF is strongly associated with math performance in children born <30 weeks' gestation or with a birthweight <1,250 g and highlights the importance of early cognitive flexibility and goal setting performance for future math performance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Evidence has ostensibly been accumulating over the past 2 decades suggesting that an external focus on the intended movement effect (e.g., on the golf club during a swing) is superior to an internal focus on body movements (e.g., on your arms during a swing) for skill acquisition. Seven previous meta-studies have all reported evidence of external focus superiority. The most comprehensive of these concluded that an external focus enhances motor skill retention, transfer, and performance and leads to reduced eletromyographic activity during performance and that more distal external foci are superior to proximal external foci for performance. Here, we reanalyzed these data using robust Bayesian meta-analyses that included several plausible models of publication bias. We found moderate to strong evidence of publication bias for all analyses. After correcting for publication bias, estimated mean effects were negligible: g = 0.01 (performance), g = 0.15 (retention), g = 0.09 (transfer), g = 0.06 (electromyography), and g = -0.01 (distance effect). Bayes factors indicated data favored the null for each analysis, ranging from BF01 = 1.3 (retention) to 5.75 (performance). We found clear evidence of heterogeneity in each analysis, suggesting the impact of attentional focus depends on yet unknown contextual factors. Our results contradict the existing consensus that an external focus is always more effective than an internal focus. Instead, focus of attention appears to have a variety of effects that we cannot account for, and, on average, those effects are small to nil. These results parallel previous metascience suggesting publication bias has obfuscated the motor learning literature. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).