Intermodal attention shifts in multimodal working memory

Attention maintains task-relevant information in working memory (WM) in an active state. We investigated whether the attention-based maintenance of stimulus representations that were encoded through different modalities is flexibly controlled by top-down mechanisms that depend on behavioral goals. Distinct components of the ERP reflect the maintenance of tactile and visual information in WM. We concurrently measured tactile (tCDA) and visual contralateral delay activity (CDA) to track the attentional activation of tactile and visual information during multimodal WM. Participants simultaneously received tactile and visual sample stimuli on the left and right sides and memorized all stimuli on one task-relevant side. After 500 msec, an auditory retrocue indicated whether the sample set's tactile or visual content had to be compared with a subsequent test stimulus set. tCDA and CDA components that emerged simultaneously during the encoding phase were consistently reduced after retrocues that marked the corresponding (tactile or visual) modality as task-irrelevant. The absolute size of cue-dependent modulations was similar for the tCDA/CDA components and did not depend on the number of tactile/visual stimuli that were initially encoded into WM. Our results suggest that modality-specific maintenance processes in sensory brain regions are flexibly modulated by top-down influences that optimize multimodal WM representations for behavioral goals

Do you look where I look? Attention shifts and response preparation following dynamic social cues

Studies investigating the effects of observing a gaze shift in another person often apply static images of a person with an averted gaze, while measuring response times to a peripheral target. Static images, however, are unlike how we normally perceive gaze shifts of others. Moreover, response times might only reveal the effects of a cue on covert attention and might fail to uncover cueing effects on overt attention or response preparation. We therefore extended the standard paradigm and measured cueing effects for ore realistic, dynamic cues (video clips),while comparing response times, saccade direction errors and saccade trajectories. Three cues were compared: A social cue, consisting of a eye-gaze shift, and two socially less relevant cues, consisting of a head tilting movement and a person walking past. Similar results were found for the two centrally presented cues (eye-gaze shift and head tilting) on all three response measures, suggesting that cueing is unaffected by the social status of the cue. Interestingly, the cue showing a person walking past showed a dissociation in the direction of the effects on response times on the one hand, and saccade direction errors and latencies on the other hand, suggesting the involvement of two types of (endogenous and exogenous) attention or a distinction between attention and saccadic response preparation. Our results suggest that by using dynamic cues and multiple response measures, properties of cueing can be revealed that would not be found otherwise

Distributed Hypothesis Testing, Attention Shifts and Transmitter Dynatmics During the Self-Organization of Brain Recognition Codes

BP (89-A-1204); Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (90-0083); National Science Foundation (IRI-90-00530); Air Force Office of Scientific Research (90-0175, 90-0128); Army Research Office (DAAL-03-88-K0088

Social Saliency of the Cue Slows Attention Shifts

Eye gaze is a powerful cue that indicates where another person\u27s attention is directed in the environment. Seeing another person\u27s eye gaze shift spontaneously and reflexively elicits a shift of one\u27s own attention to the same region in space. Here, we investigated whether reallocation of attention in the direction of eye gaze is modulated by personal familiarity with faces. On the one hand, the eye gaze of a close friend should be more effective in redirecting our attention as compared to the eye gaze of a stranger. On the other hand, the social relevance of a familiar face might itself hold attention and, thereby, slow lateral shifts of attention. To distinguish between these possibilities, we measured the efficacy of the eye gaze of personally familiar and unfamiliar faces as directional attention cues using adapted versions of the Posner paradigm with saccadic and manual responses. We found that attention shifts were slower when elicited by a perceived change in the eye gaze of a familiar individual as compared to attention shifts elicited by unfamiliar faces at short latencies (100 ms). We also measured simple detection of change in direction of gaze in personally familiar and unfamiliar faces to test whether slower attention shifts were due to slower detection. Participants detected changes in eye gaze faster for familiar faces than for unfamiliar faces. Our results suggest that personally familiar faces briefly hold attention due to their social relevance, thereby slowing shifts of attention, even though the direction of eye movements are detected faster in familiar faces

What do teachers attend to in curriculum materials?

In this paper, we describe an emerging methodology using eye tracking to explore teachers’ curricular attending as they interact with curriculum materials to design a lesson in order to learn what teachers pay attention to and how this attention shifts during planning. We propose affordances of this new method, remark on some of its limitations, and propose future directions

Sudden Attention Shifts on Wikipedia During the COVID-19 Crisis

We study how the COVID-19 pandemic, alongside the severe mobility restrictions that ensued, has impacted information access on Wikipedia, the world's largest online encyclopedia. A longitudinal analysis that combines pageview statistics for 12 Wikipedia language editions with mobility reports published by Apple and Google reveals massive shifts in the volume and nature of information seeking patterns during the pandemic. Interestingly, while we observe a transient increase in Wikipedia's pageview volume following mobility restrictions, the nature of information sought was impacted more permanently. These changes are most pronounced for language editions associated with countries where the most severe mobility restrictions were implemented. We also find that articles belonging to different topics behaved differently; e.g., attention towards entertainment-related topics is lingering and even increasing, while the interest in health- and biology-related topics was either small or transient. Our results highlight the utility of Wikipedia for studying how the pandemic is affecting people's needs, interests, and concerns.Comment: Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Kristina Gligori\'c and Maxime Peyrard contributed equally to this work. Also, this paper has been accepted at the 15th International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), please cite accordingl

Functional connectivity between prefrontal and parietal cortex drives visuospatial attention shifts

It is well established that the frontal eye-fields (FEF) in the dorsal attention network (DAN) guide top-down selective attention. In addition, converging evidence implies a causal role for the FEF in attention shifting, which is also known to recruit the ventral attention network (VAN) and fronto-striatal regions. To investigatethe causal influence of the FEF as (part of) a central hub between these networks, we applied thetaburst transcranial magnetic stimulation (TBS) off-line, combined with functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) during a cued visuo-spatial attention shifting paradigm. We found that TBS over the right FEF impaired performance on a visual discrimination task in both hemifields following attention shifts, while only left hemifield performance was affected when participants were cued to maintain the focus of attention. These effects recovered ca. 20 min post stimulation. Furthermore, particularly following attention shifts, TBS suppressed the neural signal in bilateral FEF, right inferior and superior parietal lobule (IPL/SPL) and bilateral supramarginal gyri (SMG). Immediately post stimulation, functional connectivity was impaired between right FEF and right SMG as well as right putamen. Importantly, the extent of decreased connectivity between right FEF and right SMG correlated with behavioural impairment following attention shifts. The main finding of this study demonstrates that influences from right FEF on SMG in the ventral attention network causally underly attention shifts, presumably by enabling disengagement from the current focus of attention