Drifting from slow to “D’oh!” Working memory capacity and mind wandering predict extreme reaction times and executive-control errors.

A combined experimental, individual-differences, and thought-sampling study tested the predictions of executive attention (e.g., Engle & Kane, 2004) and coordinative binding (e.g., Oberauer, Süß, Wilhelm, & Sander, 2007) theories of working memory capacity (WMC). We assessed 288 subjects' WMC and their performance and mind-wandering rates during a sustained-attention task; subjects completed either a go/no-go version requiring executive control over habit or a vigilance version that did not. We further combined the data with those from McVay and Kane (2009) to (1) gauge the contributions of WMC and attentional lapses to the worst performance rule and the tail, or t parameter, of reaction time (RT) distributions; (2) assess which parameters from a quantitative evidence-accumulation RT model were predicted by WMC and mind-wandering reports; and (3) consider intrasubject RT patterns—particularly, speeding—as potential objective markers of mind wandering. We found that WMC predicted action and thought control in only some conditions, that attentional lapses (indicated by task-unrelated-thought reports and drift-rate variability in evidence accumulation) contributed to t, performance accuracy, and WMC's association with them and that mind-wandering experiences were not predicted by trial-to-trial RT changes, and so they cannot always be inferred from objective performance measures

The effects of self-report cognitive failures and cognitive load on antisaccade performance

Individuals reporting high levels of distractibility in everyday life show impaired performance in standard laboratory tasks measuring selective attention and inhibitory processes. Similarly, increasing cognitive load leads to more errors/distraction in a variety of cognitive tasks. How these two factors interact is currently unclear; highly distractible individuals may be affected more when their cognitive resources are taxed, or load may linearly affect performance for all individuals. We investigated the relationship between self-reported levels of cognitive failures (CF) in daily life and performance in the antisaccade task, a widely used tool examining attentional control. Levels of concurrent cognitive demand were manipulated using a secondary auditory discrimination task. We found that both levels of self-reported CF and task load increased antisaccade latencies while having no effect on prosaccade eye-movements. However individuals rating themselves as suffering few daily life distractions showed a comparable load cost to those who experience many. These findings suggest that the likelihood of distraction is governed by the addition of both internal susceptibility and the external current load placed on working memory

Do Attentional Lapses Account for the Worst Performance Rule?

The worst performance rule (WPR) describes the phenomenon that individuals’ slowest responses in a task are often more predictive of their intelligence than their fastest or average responses. To explain this phenomenon, it was previously suggested that occasional lapses of attention during task completion might be associated with particularly slow reaction times. Because less intelligent individuals should experience lapses of attention more frequently, reaction time distribution should be more heavily skewed for them than for more intelligent people. Consequently, the correlation between intelligence and reaction times should increase from the lowest to the highest quantile of the response time distribution. This attentional lapses account has some intuitive appeal, but has not yet been tested empirically. Using a hierarchical modeling approach, we investigated whether the WPR pattern would disappear when including different behavioral, self-report, and neural measurements of attentional lapses as predictors. In a sample of N = 85, we found that attentional lapses accounted for the WPR, but effect sizes of single covariates were mostly small to very small. We replicated these results in a reanalysis of a much larger previously published data set. Our findings render empirical support to the attentional lapses account of the WPR

Do sleep difficulties exacerbate deficits in sustained attention following traumatic brain injury?

Sustained attention has been shown to be vulnerable following traumatic brain injury (TBI). Sleep restriction and disturbances have been shown to negatively affect sustained attention. Sleep disorders are common but under-diagnosed after TBI. Thus, it seems possible that sleep disturbances may exacerbate neuropsychological deficits for a proportion of individuals who have sustained a TBI. The aim of this prospective study was to examine whether poor sleepers post-TBI had poorer sustained and general attentional functioning than good sleepers post-TBI. Retrospective subjective, prospective subjective, and objective measures were used to assess participants’ sleep. The results showed that the poor sleep group had significantly poorer sustained attention ability than the good sleep group. The differences on other measures of attention were not significant. This study supports the use of measures that capture specific components of attention rather than global measures of attention, and highlights the importance of assessing and treating sleep problems in brain injury rehabilitation

THE ROLE OF ACETYLCHOLINE IN ATTENTION AND LAPSES IN ATTENTION IN RATS USING THE MODE AND DEVIATION FROM MODE OF REACTION TIME LATENCY

Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is currently the neurodevelopmental disorder most commonly diagnosed in children in the United States, and one of the defining characteristics of ADHD is inattention. Inattention is marked by increased lapses in attention, and when assessed clinically, it has been highly correlated with reaction-time variability (RTV). Evidence from the human/clinical literature has shown an inherently higher RTV to be the primary quantitative indicator of an ADHD diagnosis. Reaction-time distributions are characterized by an asymmetrical rightward skew, and because of the prevalence of this presentation, it has been theorized that the distribution peak and skew represent separate phenomena, or attention and lapses in attention respectively. By separating out the motor component of reaction time and employing parameters that closely parallel those used in clinical assessments of attention, the two-choice serial reaction time task (2-CSRTT) yields a measure in rodents, initiation time (IT), akin to human reaction time. Similar to the analysis of human reaction time using an ex-Gaussian approach, the peak and skew of IT distributions can be dissociated and separately analyzed using the mode and deviation from mode (distribution mean minus the mode), thus rendering a rodent variability measure indicative of lapses in attention. The effects of attentional stress are cumulative and can be induced via manipulations of both environmental and external factors. The current studies utilized both by decreasing signal salience and blocking the neurotransmitter, acetylcholine. Additionally, in order to separate high performing rats from low performers, a median split based on training IT devmode was introduced as a third independent variable. Lapses significantly increased when salience was reduced but remained unaffected by scopolamine HBr for all rats, as no main effect of baseline performance was observed following the median split. However, a three-way interaction effect was observed and under less salient conditions, lapses in attention increased for low performing rats following the blockade of acetylcholine transmission. The current findings, therefore, implicate acetylcholine in the facilitation and regulation of higher order attentional processes, such as sustaining attention and maintaining vigilance, and indicate an increased sensitivity to attentional stress in low performers

Imaginary relish and exquisite torture: The elaborated intrusion theory of desire

The authors argue that human desire involves conscious cognition that has strong affective connotation and is potentially involved in the determination of appetitive behavior rather than being epiphenomenal to it. Intrusive thoughts about appetitive targets are triggered automatically by external or physiological cues and by cognitive associates. When intrusions elicit significant pleasure or relief, cognitive elaboration usually ensues. Elaboration competes with concurrent cognitive tasks through retrieval of target-related information and its retention in working memory. Sensory images are especially important products of intrusion and elaboration because they simulate the sensory and emotional qualities of target acquisition. Desire images are momentarily rewarding but amplify awareness of somatic and emotional deficits. Effects of desires on behavior are moderated by competing incentives, target availability, and skills. The theory provides a coherent account of existing data and suggests new directions for research and treatment

Working memory capacity and the antisaccade task: A microanalytic–macroanalytic investigation of individual differences in goal activation and maintenance

The association between working memory capacity (WMC) and the antisaccade task, which requires subjects to move their eyes and attention away from a strong visual cue, supports the claim that WMC is partially an attentional construct (Kane, Bleckley, Conway, & Engle, 2001; Unsworth, Schrock, & Engle, 2004). Specifically, the WMC-antisaccade relation suggests that WMC helps maintain and execute task goals despite interference from habitual actions. Related work has recently shown that mind wandering (McVay & Kane, 2009, 2012a, 2012b) and reaction time (RT) variability (Unsworth, 2015) are also related to WMC and they partially explain WMC’s prediction of cognitive abilities. Here, we tested whether mind-wandering propensity and intraindividual RT variation account for WMC’s associations with 2 antisaccade-cued choice RT tasks. In addition, we asked whether any influences of WMC, mind wandering, or intraindividual RT variation on antisaccade are moderated by (a) the temporal gap between fixation and the flashing location cue, and (b) whether targets switch sides on consecutive trials. Our quasi-experimental study reexamined a published dataset (Kane et al., 2016) comprising 472 subjects who completed 6 WMC tasks, 5 attentional tasks with mind-wandering probes, 5 tasks from which we measured intraindividual RT variation, and 2 antisaccade tasks with varying fixation-cue gap durations. The WMC-antisaccade association was not accounted for by mind wandering or intraindividual RT variation. WMC’s effects on antisaccade performance were greater with longer fixation-to-cue intervals, suggesting that goal activation processes—beyond the ability to control mind wandering and RT variability—are partially responsible for the WMC-antisaccade relation

Which working memory components predict fluid intelligence : the roles of attention control and active buffer capacity

This study tested which of two crucial mechanisms of working memory (WM): attention control, consisting of focusing attention on the proper task-set as well as blocking distraction, and the active buffer capacity, related to the number of chunks that can be actively maintained, plays a more important role in WM’s contribution to fluid intelligence. In the first study, the antisaccade task was used, the standard measure of attention control, in a modified variant which resulted in scores less sensitive to individual differences in the active buffer capacity, in comparison to the standard variant. In effect, attention control became a weak predictor of Gf, explaining less than one third of its variance accounted for by the capacity. In the second study, a variant of another attention control test, the Stroop task, was applied, which minimized the load on capacity, and no significant contribution of this task to Gf was found. Thus, when contribution of control and capacity were unconfounded, attention control mechanisms of WM contributed to fluid intelligence to a lesser extent than did the mechanisms related to the active buffer of WM

Modeling the distributional dynamics of attention and semantic interference in word production

In recent years, it has become clear that attention plays an important role in spoken word production. Some of this evidence comes from distributional analyses of reaction time (RT) in regular picture naming and picture-word interference. Yet we lack a mechanistic account of how the properties of RT distributions come to reflect attentional processes and how these processes may in turn modulate the amount of conflict between lexical representations. Here, we present a computational account according to which attentional lapses allow for existing conflict to build up unsupervised on a subset of trials, thus modulating the shape of the resulting RT distribution. Our process model resolves discrepancies between outcomes of previous studies on semantic interference. Moreover, the model's predictions were confirmed in a new experiment where participants' motivation to remain attentive determined the size and distributional locus of semantic interference in picture naming. We conclude that process modeling of RT distributions importantly improves our understanding of the interplay between attention and conflict in word production. Our model thus provides a framework for interpreting distributional analyses of RT data in picture naming tasks