Joint attention is intact even when visuospatial working memory is occupied

Does age-related hearing loss deteriorate attentional resources?

Recent work suggests that age-related hearing loss (HL) is a possible risk factor for cognitive decline in older adults. Resulting poor speech recognition negatively impacts cognitive, social and emotional functioning and may relate to dementia. However, little is known about the consequences of hearing loss on other non-linguistic domains of cognition. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of HL on covert orienting of attention, selective attention and executive control. We compared older adults with and without mild to moderate hearing loss (26-60 dB) performing (1) a spatial cueing task with uninformative central cues (social vs. nonsocial cues), (2) a flanker task and (3) a neuropsychological assessment of attention. The results showed that overall response times and flanker interference effects were comparable across groups. However, in spatial cueing of attention using social and nonsocial cues, hearing impaired individuals were characterized by reduced validity effects, though no additional group differences were found between social and nonsocial cues. Hearing impaired individuals also demonstrated diminished performance on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) and on tasks requiring divided attention and flexibility. This work indicates that while response speed and response inhibition appear to be preserved following mild-to-moderate acquired hearing loss, orienting of attention, divided attention and the ability to flexibly allocate attentional resources are more deteriorated in older adults with HL. This work suggests that hearing loss might exacerbate the detrimental influences of aging on visual attention.

Different Types of Survey-Based Environmental Representations: Egocentric vs. Allocentric Cognitive Maps

The goal of the current study was to show the existence of distinct types of survey-based environmental representations, egocentric and allocentric, and provide experimental evidence that they are formed by different types of navigational strategies, path integration and map-based navigation, respectively. After traversing an unfamiliar route, participants were either disoriented and asked to point to non-visible landmarks encountered on the route (Experiment 1) or presented with a secondary spatial working memory task while determining the spatial locations of objects on the route (Experiment 2). The results demonstrate a double dissociation between the navigational strategies underlying the formation of allocentric and egocentric survey-based representation. Specifically, only the individuals who generated egocentric survey-based representations of the route were affected by disorientation, suggesting they relied primarily on a path integration strategy combined with landmark/scene processing at each route segment. In contrast, only allocentric-survey mappers were affected by the secondary spatial working memory task, suggesting their use of map-based navigation. This research is the first to show that path integration, in conjunction with egocentric landmark processing, is a distinct standalone navigational strategy underpinning the formation of a unique type of environmental representation-the egocentric survey-based representation.

Internal Social Attention: Gaze Cues Stored in Working Memory Trigger Involuntary Attentional Orienting

Previous research has shown that social cues, including eye gaze, can readily guide our focus of attention-a phenomenon referred to as social attention. Here, we demonstrated that internally maintained social cues in working memory (WM) can produce an analogous attentional effect (N = 57). Using the delayed-match-to-sample paradigm combined with the dot-probe task, we found that holding irrelevant gaze cues in WM can induce attentional orienting in college-age adults. Importantly, this WM-induced attention effect could not be explained simply by the perceptual-attentional process, because the identical gaze cues that were only passively viewed and not memorized in WM could not trigger attentional orienting beyond the typical time window of social attention. Furthermore, nonsocial cues (i.e., arrows) held in WM failed to elicit the attentional-orienting effect. These findings provide new evidence for the conceptualization of WM as internally directed attention and highlight the uniqueness of social attention compared with nonsocial attention.

Gaze Cuing Effects in Peripheral Vision

When we see another person’s gaze, spatial attention shifts toward the gaze direction. Thus, a gaze perceiver can more quickly respond to a forthcoming target when it appears in a direction of a gaze giver than when it does not. This phenomenon is termed the gaze cuing effect. Previous studies have investigated the gaze cuing effect only in foveal vision; hence, it remains unclear whether the gaze cuing effect is induced when a face is presented in peripheral vision. This is an important issue because in our daily lives we communicate not only with people in front of us but also with those in our periphery. To tackle this question, we manipulated vertically aligned locations of a facial stimulus (i.e., a face stimulus appeared above or below the center fixation) and tested the extent to which a gaze cuing effect, conveyed by gaze shifts of another, is observed in the periphery. The facial stimulus was located 0, ±2.5, ±5.0, and ±7.5° of the visual angle from the center of the display, and a target was presented 5.6° to the left or right of the center of the display. In Experiment 1, when participants responded to the location of an abrupt onset of a target (i.e., localization task), we observed significant gaze cuing effects when a facial stimulus was located 0, ±2.5, and ±5.0°, but not ±7.5°. In Experiment 2, we replicated the findings in Experiment 1 if participants pressed a key only when a target appeared (i.e., detection task). In Experiment 3, we used adjusted sizes of facial images based on the cortical representations and manipulated eye directions of the facial images oriented toward the possible target locations; it resulted in enlarged effective field of view for gaze cuing effects. The study reveals that gaze cuing effects can appear even in peripheral vision and within a vertical distance of 5.0° of the visual angles, but the effective field of view is expanded when the facial image is adjusted based on the cortical representations, and eye gaze directly looks at the possible target locations.