Anticipated psychosocial stress informs sustained attention performance: A behavioral and physiological perspective

The ability to sustain attention is paramount to the completion of daily activities, such as driving or attending to a lecture. Previous studies have suggested that stress prior to cognitive testing leads to changes in attentional performance based on stressor context, but the impact of anticipated stress on attention remains unclear. To answer this question, the current study examined a sample of thirty-one undergraduate students (age 18-35, M=21.5, S.D.=3.1) who either anticipated a psychosocial stressor or completed guided meditation before completing a go/no-go sustained attention task (gradCPT). Subjective measures of anxiety, self-esteem, extraversion, and neuroticism were also gathered along with heart rate and electrodermal activity measures to objectively determine stress reactivity. Correlational analyses revealed negative associations between state anxiety and commission errors (r=-0.5, p=0.048), reaction time variability (r=-0.522, p=0.038), and a positive association between state anxiety and accuracy (d’) (r=0.521, p=0.038) in the stress condition exclusively. When controlling for state anxiety, mixed design ANOVAs revealed a significant main effect of condition on d’ (F(1,28)=5.54, p=0.026), where the stress group showed lower d’. Further, data showed a trend of an interaction on reaction time variability (F(1,28)=3.49, p=0.072) where increased variability across the task duration occurred as a function of condition assignment, and a trend of a main effect of condition (F(1,28)=3.93, p=0.057) suggesting more commission errors under stress. The results suggest that anticipation of a stressor does impact sustained attention, but that performance may exist on a spectrum based on subjective appraisal of the stressor. (Author abstract)Brau, J.M., Fortenbaugh, F.C., & Esterman, M. (2021). Anticipated psychosocial stress informs sustained attention performance: A behavioral and physiological perspective. Retrieved from http://academicarchive.snhu.ed

Scene perception from central to peripheral vision

Citation: Loschky, L. C., Nuthmann, A., Fortenbaugh, F. C., & Levi, D. M. (2017). Scene perception from central to peripheral vision. Journal of Vision, 17(1), 5. doi:10.1167/17.1.6When we view a real-world scene with both eyes, we see a seamless vista that covers a visual field of more than 200° diameter horizontally and 125° vertically. The entire scene generally appears to have high resolution, contrast, and color saturation, despite the dramatic changes in the optics, anatomy, and physiology of our eyes and visual pathways as the retinal images shift from the center of gaze to the periphery. Thus, a key issue in real-world scene perception is the roles played by central and peripheral vision. Central vision has the highest visual acuity and is where we pay the most attention to objects of interest. However, since central vision only extends out to a radius of roughly 5° around fixation, peripheral vision is the vast majority of our visual field. Yet, the nature of peripheral vision is mysterious, in that our common intuitions about it are often wrong. For example, most people appear to be quite unaware of the limitations of peripheral vision (Lau & Rosenthal, 2011). This is shown by how surprising viewers find demonstrations of the loss of visual resolution with eccentricity, such as failure to detect even roughly calibrated increasing blur with eccentricity using the Geisler and Perry (1998) algorithm (for a demonstration of this, see https://youtu.be/9DTHVRhBcQ0). Conversely, many people would probably be surprised to know that while driving it is possible to maintain one's lane position using only peripheral vision even while using central vision for an attentionally demanding visual task located 30° below the dashboard (Summala, Nieminen, & Punto, 1996). (Importantly, however, consistent with what one might expect, under the same conditions, drivers are also very poor at noticing potential crash hazards, such as when a car in front of them suddenly slows down—thus, driving using only peripheral vision is very dangerous [Summala, Lamble, & Laakso, 1998].)

Shifting attention in viewer- and object-based reference frames after unilateral brain injury

The aims of the present study were to investigate the respective roles that object- and viewer-based reference frames play in reorienting visual attention, and to assess their influence after unilateral brain injury. To do so, we studied 16 right hemisphere injured (RHI) and 13 left hemisphere injured (LHI) patients. We used a cueing design that manipulates the location of cues and targets relative to a display comprised of two rectangles (i.e., objects). Unlike previous studies with patients, we presented all cues at midline rather than in the left or right visual fields. Thus, in the critical conditions in which targets were presented laterally, reorienting of attention was always from a midline cue. Performance was measured for lateralized target detection as a function of viewer-based (contra- and ipsilesional sides) and object-based (requiring reorienting within or between objects) reference frames. As expected, contralesional detection was slower than ipsilesional detection for the patients. More importantly, objects influenced target detection differently in the contralesional and ipsilesional fields. Contralesionally, reorienting to a target within the cued object took longer than reorienting to a target in the same location but in the uncued object. This finding is consistent with object-based neglect. Ipsilesionally, the means were in the opposite direction. Furthermore, no significant difference was found in object-based influences between the patient groups (RHI vs. LHI). These findings are discussed in the context of reference frames used in reorienting attention for target detection

When here becomes there: attentional distribution modulates foveal bias in peripheral localization

Much research concerning attention has focused on changes in the perceptual qualities of objects while attentional states were varied. Here, we address a complementary question—namely, how perceived location can be altered by the distribution of sustained attention over the visual field. We also present a new way to assess the effects of distributing spatial attention across the visual field. We measured magnitude judgments relative to an aperture edge to test perceived location across a large range of eccentricities (30°), and manipulated spatial uncertainty in target locations to examine perceived location under three different distributions of spatial attention. Across three experiments, the results showed that changing the distribution of sustained attention significantly alters known foveal biases in peripheral localization

Individual differences in visual field shape modulate the effects of attention on the lower visual field advantage in crowding.

It has previously been reported that visual crowding of a target by flankers is stronger in the upper visual field than in the lower, and this finding has been attributed to greater attentional resolution in the lower hemifield (He, Cavanagh, & Intriligator, 1996). Here we show that the upper/lower asymmetry in visual crowding can be explained by natural variations in the borders of each individual's visual field. Specifically, asymmetry in crowding along the vertical meridian can be almost entirely accounted for by replacing the conventional definition of visual field location, in units of degrees of visual angle, with a definition based on the ratio of the extents of an individual's upper and lower visual field. We also show that the upper/lower crowding asymmetry is eliminated when stimulus eccentricity is expressed in units of percentage of visual field extent but is present when the conventional measure of visual angle is used. We further demonstrate that the relationship between visual field extent and perceptual asymmetry is most evident when participants are able to focus their attention on the target location. These results reveal important influences of visual field boundaries on visual perception, even for visual field locations far from those boundaries