Sustained selective attention in adolescence: Cognitive development and predictors of distractibility at school

Despite much research into the development of attention in adolescence, mixed results and between-task differences have precluded clear conclusions regarding the relative early or late maturation of attention abilities. Moreover, although adolescents constantly face the need to pay attention at school, it remains unclear whether laboratory measures of attention can predict their ability to sustain attention focus during lessons. Therefore, here we devised a task that was sensitive to measure both sustained and selective attention and tested whether task measures could predict adolescents' levels of inattention during lessons. In total, 166 adolescents (aged 12-17 years) and 50 adults performed a sustained selective attention task, searching for letter targets while ignoring salient yet entirely irrelevant distractor faces, under different levels of perceptual load-an established determinant of attention in adults. Inattention levels during a just preceding classroom lesson were measured using a novel self-report classroom distractibility checklist. The results established that sustained attention (measured with response variability) continued to develop throughout adolescence across perceptual load levels. In contrast, there was an earlier maturation of the effect of perceptual load on selective attention; load modulation of distractor interference was larger in the early adolescence period compared with later periods. Both distractor interference and response variability were significant unique predictors of distractibility in the classroom, including when controlling for interest in the lesson and cognitive aptitude. Overall, the results demonstrate divergence of development of sustained and selective attention in adolescence and establish both as significant predictors of attention in the important educational setting of school lessons.

Robust perceptual-load-dependent audiovisual integration in adult ADHD

We perceive our daily-life surrounded by different senses (e.g., visual, and auditory). For a coherent percept, our brain binds those multiple streams of sensory stimulations, i.e., multisensory integration (MI). Dependent on stimulus complexity, early MI is triggered by bottom-up or late via top-down attentional deployment. Adult attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with successful bottom-up MI and deficient top-down MI. In the current study, we investigated the robustness of the bottom-up MI by adding additional task demand varying the perceptual load. We hypothesized diminished bottom-up MI for high perceptual load for patients with ADHD. 18 adult patients with ADHD and 18 age- and gender-matched healthy controls participated in this study. In the visual search paradigm, a target letter was surrounded by uniform distractors (low load) or by different letters (high load). Additionally, either unimodal (visual flash, auditory beep) or multimodal (audiovisual) flanked the visual search. Linear-mixed modeling was used to investigate the influence of load on reaction times. Further, the race model inequality was calculated. Patients with ADHD showed a similar degree of MI performance like healthy controls, irrespective of perceptual load manipulation. ADHD patients violated the race model for the low load but not for the high-load condition. There seems to be robust bottom-up MI independent of perceptual load in ADHD patients. However, the sensory accumulation might be altered when attentional demands are high.

Shared cognitive resources between memory and attention during sound-sequence encoding

You are on the phone, walking down a street. This daily situation calls for selective attention, allowing you to ignore surrounding irrelevant sounds, while trying to encode in memory the relevant information from the phone. Attention and memory are indeed two cognitive functions that are interacting constantly. However, their interaction is not yet well characterized during sound-sequence encoding. We independently manipulated both selective attention and working memory in a delayed-matching-to-sample of two tone-series, played successively in one ear. During the first melody presentation (memory encoding), weakly or highly distracting melodies were played in the other ear. Detection of the difference between the two comparison melodies could be easy or difficult, requiring low- or high-precision encoding, i.e., low or high memory load. Sixteen non-musician and 16 musician participants performed this new task. As expected, both groups of participants were less accurate in the difficult memory task and in difficult-to-ignore distractor conditions. Importantly, an interaction between memory-task difficulty and distractor difficulty was found in both groups. Non-musicians presented less difference between easy and difficult-to-ignore distractors in the difficult than in the easy memory task. On the contrary, musicians, with better performance than non-musicians, showed a greater difference between easy and difficult-to-ignore distractors in the difficult than in the easy memory task. In a second experiment including trials without a distractor, we could show that these effects are in line with the cognitive load theory. Taken together, these results speak for shared cognitive resources between working memory and attention during sound-sequence encoding.

Effects of age and surface instability on the control of the center of mass

During standing, posture can be controlled by accelerating the Center of Mass (CoM) through shifting the center of pressure (CoP) within the base of support by applying ankle moments ("CoP mechanism"), or through the "counter-rotation mechanism", i.e., changing the angular momentum of segments around the CoM to change the direction of the ground reaction force. Postural control develops over the lifespan; at both the beginning and the end of the lifespan adequate postural control appears more challenging. In this study, we aimed to assess mediolateral balance performance and the related use of the postural control mechanisms in children, older adults and younger adults when standing on different (unstable) surfaces. Sixteen pre-pubertal children (6-9y), 17 younger adults (18-24y) and eight older adults (65-80y) performed bipedal upright standing trials of 16 s on a rigid surface and on three balance boards that could freely move in the frontal plane, varying in height (15-19 cm) of the surface of the board above the point of contact with the floor. Full body kinematics (16 segments, 48 markers, using SIMI 3D-motion analysis system (GmbH) and DeepLabCut and Anipose) were retrieved. Performance related outcome measures, i.e., the number of trials with balance loss and the Root Mean Square (RMS) of the time series of the CoM acceleration, the contributions of the CoP mechanism and the counter-rotation mechanism to the CoM acceleration in the frontal plane and selected kinematic measures, i.e. the orientation of the board and the head and the Mean Power Frequency (MPF) of the balance board orientation and the CoM acceleration were determined. Balance loss only occurred when standing on the highest balance board, twice in one older adult once in one younger adult. In children and older adults, the RMS of the CoM accelerations were larger, corresponding to poorer balance performance. Across age groups and conditions, the contribution of the CoP mechanism to the total CoM acceleration was much larger than that of the counter-rotation mechanisms, ranging from 94% to 113% vs 23% to 38% (with totals higher than 100% indicating opposite effects of both mechanisms). Deviations in head orientation were small compared to deviations in balance board orientation. We suggest that the CoP mechanism is dominant, since the counter-rotation mechanism would conflict with stabilizing the orientation of the head in space.

Trauma moderates the development of the oscillatory dynamics serving working memory in a sex-specific manner

Working memory, the ability to hold items in memory stores for further manipulation, is a higher order cognitive process that supports many aspects of daily life. Childhood trauma has been associated with altered cognitive development including particular deficits in verbal working memory (VWM), but the neural underpinnings remain poorly understood. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) studies of VWM have reliably shown decreased alpha activity in left-lateralized language regions during encoding, and increased alpha activity in parieto-occipital cortices during the maintenance phase. In this study, we examined whether childhood trauma affects behavioral performance and the oscillatory dynamics serving VWM using MEG in a cohort of 9- to 15-year-old youth. All participants completed a modified version of the UCLA Trauma History Profile and then performed a VWM task during MEG. Our findings indicated a sex-by-age-by-trauma three-way interaction, whereby younger females experiencing higher levels of trauma had the lowest d' accuracy scores and the strongest positive correlations with age (i.e. older performed better). Likewise, females with higher levels of childhood trauma exhibited altered age-related alpha changes during the maintenance phase within the right temporal and parietal cortices. These findings suggest that trauma exposure may alter the developmental trajectory of neural oscillations serving VWM processing in a sex-specific way.

School-age children benefit from voice gender cue differences for the perception of speech in competing speech

Differences in speakers' voice characteristics, such as mean fundamental frequency (F0) and vocal-tract length (VTL), that primarily define speakers' so-called perceived voice gender facilitate the perception of speech in competing speech. Perceiving speech in competing speech is particularly challenging for children, which may relate to their lower sensitivity to differences in voice characteristics than adults. This study investigated the development of the benefit from F0 and VTL differences in school-age children (4-12 years) for separating two competing speakers while tasked with comprehending one of them and also the relationship between this benefit and their corresponding voice discrimination thresholds. Children benefited from differences in F0, VTL, or both cues at all ages tested. This benefit proportionally remained the same across age, although overall accuracy continued to differ from that of adults. Additionally, children's benefit from F0 and VTL differences and their overall accuracy were not related to their discrimination thresholds. Hence, although children's voice discrimination thresholds and speech in competing speech perception abilities develop throughout the school-age years, children already show a benefit from voice gender cue differences early on. Factors other than children's discrimination thresholds seem to relate more closely to their developing speech in competing speech perception abilities.

The Deficit of Early Selective Attention in Adults With Sluggish Cognitive Tempo: In Comparison With Those With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

Sluggish cognitive tempo (SCT) is a cluster of attentional symptoms characterized by slow information processing and behavior, distractibility, mental confusion, absent-mindedness, and hypoactivity. The present study aimed to compare early and late selective attention in the information processing speed of adults with SCT to those with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and adults without any attentional problems. The participants were screened using Barkley Adult ADHD Rating Scale-IV and divided into the following groups: SCT (N = 24), ADHD (N = 24), and controls (N = 25). All participants completed the irrelevant distractor task measuring early and late selective attention under load condition (low vs. high) and distractor condition (no-distractor vs. distractor). The inefficiency index was calculated by subtracting the reaction time of no-distractor condition of correct trials from the reaction time of distractor condition to control the impact of accuracy. Upon analysis, the SCT group showed a lower efficiency compared to the ADHD group under high load, while the ADHD group showed lower efficiency under low load than high load. This meant that the ADHD group had increased efficiency of selective attention with higher load, while the SCT group had low efficiency of selective attention even under high loads. These results suggest that the symptoms of “slow” or “distracted” in SCT could be attributed to the reduced speed and efficiency of selective attention in early information processing and the problem can be pronounced in situations with distractors. The results of the study imply that the attention-deficit-like symptoms shown in those with SCT and ADHD can be distinguished in specific stage of information processing.

Crossmodal spatial distraction across the lifespan

The ability to resist distracting stimuli whilst voluntarily focusing on a task is fundamental to our everyday cognitive functioning. Here, we investigated how this ability develops, and thereafter declines, across the lifespan using a single task/experiment. Young children (5-7 years), older children (10-11 years), young adults (20-27 years), and older adults (62-86 years) were presented with complex visual scenes. Endogenous (voluntary) attention was engaged by having the participants search for a visual target presented on either the left or right side of the display. The onset of the visual scenes was preceded - at stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) of 50, 200, or 500 ms - by a task-irrelevant sound (an exogenous crossmodal spatial distractor) delivered either on the same or opposite side as the visual target, or simultaneously on both sides (cued, uncued, or neutral trials, respectively). Age-related differences were revealed, especially in the extreme age-groups, which showed a greater impact of crossmodal spatial distractors. Young children were highly susceptible to exogenous spatial distraction at the shortest SOA (50 ms), whereas older adults were distracted at all SOAs, showing significant exogenous capture effects during the visual search task. By contrast, older children and young adults' search performance was not significantly affected by crossmodal spatial distraction. Overall, these findings present a detailed picture of the developmental trajectory of endogenous resistance to crossmodal spatial distraction from childhood to old age and demonstrate a different efficiency in coping with distraction across the four age-groups studied.

Load effects in attention: Comparing tasks and age groups

Attention is limited in terms of both capacity (i.e., amount of information attended) and selectivity (i.e., the degree to which non-attended information is nonetheless processed). One of the seminal theories in the field, load theory, predicts that these two aspects of attention interact in systematic ways. Specifically, load theory predicts that when the amount of information to attend is less than the available capacity, spare attention will naturally leak out to unattended items. While load theory has found a great deal of empirical support, the robustness of the findings has recently been called into question, in particular with respect to the extent to which the predictions are borne out across different tasks and populations. Here we report tests of perceptual load effects in two different tasks (change detection and enumeration) and in two populations (adults and 7- to 8-year-old children). Adults' accuracies did not demonstrate the predicted interaction between the capacity and selection dimensions, whereas children's performance, in addition to being overall worse than adults, did show the interaction. The overall lower accuracy of children was seen to be the result of a larger performance decrement in response to capacity demands, distracting information, and their interaction. Interestingly, while these results were seen at the level of the two tasks, there was no within-participants correlation across tasks. Overall, these results suggest that maturation-related changes attenuate the magnitude of distractor effects in attention, which in turn limits the evidence for interactions between capacity and selection in high-functioning populations.

Computational modelling of attentional bias towards threat in paediatric anxiety

Computational modelling can be used to precisely characterize the cognitive processes involved in attentional biases towards threat, yet so far has only been applied in the context of adult anxiety. Furthermore, studies investigating attentional biases in childhood anxiety have largely used tasks that conflate automatic and controlled attentional processes. By using a perceptual load paradigm, we separately investigate contributions from automatic and controlled processes to attentional biases towards negative stimuli and their association with paediatric anxiety. We also use computational modelling to investigate these mechanisms in children for the first time. In a sample of 60 children (aged 5‐11 years) we used a perceptual load task specifically adapted for children, in order to investigate attentional biases towards fearful (compared with happy and neutral) faces. Outcome measures were reaction time and percentage accuracy. We applied a drift diffusion model to investigate the precise cognitive mechanisms involved. The load effect was associated with significant differences in response time, accuracy and the diffusion modelling parameters drift rate and extra‐decisional time. Greater anxiety was associated with greater accuracy and the diffusion modelling parameter ‘drift rate’ on the fearful face trials. This was specific to the high load condition. These findings suggest that attentional biases towards fearful faces in childhood anxiety are driven by increased perceptual sensitivity towards fear in automatic attentional systems. Our findings from computational modelling suggest that current attention bias modification treatments should target perceptual encoding directly rather than processes occurring afterwards.

Developmental Differences in Filtering Auditory and Visual Distractors During Visual Selective Attention

The current experiment examined changes in visual selective attention in young children, older children, young adults, and older adults while participants were instructed to ignore auditory and visual distractors. The aims of the study were to: (a) determine if the Perceptual Load Hypothesis (PLH) (distraction greater under low perceptual load) could predict which irrelevant stimuli would disrupt visual selective attention, and (b) if auditory to visual shifts found in modality dominance research could be extended to selective attention tasks. Overall, distractibility decreased with age, with incompatible distractors having larger costs in young and older children than adults. In regard to accuracy, visual distractibility did not differ across age nor load, whereas, auditory interference was more pronounced early in development and correlated with age. Auditory and visual distractors also slowed down responses in young and older children more than adults. Finally, the PLH did not predict performance. Rather, children often showed the opposite pattern, with visual distractors having a greater cost in the high load condition (older children) and auditory distractors having a greater cost in the high load condition (young children). These findings are consistent with research examining the development of modality dominance and shed light on changes in multisensory processing and selective attention across the lifespan.

Large inter-individual and intra-individual variability in the effect of perceptual load

This study examined whether the recurrent difficulty to replicate results obtained with paradigms measuring distractor processing as a function of perceptual load is due to individual differences. We first reanalyzed, at the individual level, the data of eight previously reported experiments. These reanalyses revealed substantial inter-individual differences, with particularly low percentage of participants whose performance matched the load theory's predictions (i.e., larger distractor interference with low than high levels of load). Moreover, frequently the results were opposite to the theory's predictions-larger interference in the high than low load condition; and often a reversed compatibility effect emerged-better performance in the incompatible than neutral condition. Subsequently, seven observers participated in five identical experimental sessions. If the observed inter-individual differences are due to some stable trait or perceptual capacity, similar results should have emerged in all sessions of a given participant. However, all seven participants showed large between-sessions variations with similar patterns to those found between participants. These findings question the theoretical foundation implemented with these paradigms, as none of the theories suggested thus far can account for such inter- and intra-individual differences. Thus, these paradigms should be used with caution until further research will provide better understanding of what they actually measure.

Annual Research Review: On the relations among self-regulation, self-control, executive functioning, effortful control, cognitive control, impulsivity, risk-taking, and inhibition for developmental psychopathology

BACKGROUND

Self-regulation (SR) is central to developmental psychopathology, but progress has been impeded by varying terminology and meanings across fields and literatures.

METHODS

The present review attempts to move that discussion forward by noting key sources of prior confusion such as measurement-concept confounding, and then arguing the following major points.

RESULTS

First, the field needs a domain-general construct of SR that encompasses SR of action, emotion, and cognition and involves both top-down and bottom-up regulatory processes. This does not assume a shared core process across emotion, action, and cognition, but is intended to provide clarity on the extent of various claims about kinds of SR. Second, top-down aspects of SR need to be integrated. These include (a) basic processes that develop early and address immediate conflict signals, such as cognitive control and effortful control (EC), and (b) complex cognition and strategies for addressing future conflict, represented by the regulatory application of complex aspects of executive functioning. Executive function (EF) and cognitive control are not identical to SR because they can be used for other activities, but account for top-down aspects of SR at the cognitive level. Third, impulsivity, risk-taking, and disinhibition are distinct although overlapping; a taxonomy of the kinds of breakdowns of SR associated with psychopathology requires their differentiation. Fourth, different aspects of the SR universe can be organized hierarchically in relation to granularity, development, and time. Low-level components assemble into high-level components. This hierarchical perspective is consistent across literatures.

CONCLUSIONS

It is hoped that the framework outlined here will facilitate integration and cross-talk among investigators working from different perspectives, and facilitate individual differences research on how SR relates to developmental psychopathology.

Perceptual Load Affects Eyewitness Accuracy and Susceptibility to Leading Questions

Load Theory (Lavie, 1995, 2005) states that the level of perceptual load in a task (i.e., the amount of information involved in processing task-relevant stimuli) determines the efficiency of selective attention. There is evidence that perceptual load affects distractor processing, with increased inattentional blindness under high load. Given that high load can result in individuals failing to report seeing obvious objects, it is conceivable that load may also impair memory for the scene. The current study is the first to assess the effect of perceptual load on eyewitness memory. Across three experiments (two video-based and one in a driving simulator), the effect of perceptual load on eyewitness memory was assessed. The results showed that eyewitnesses were less accurate under high load, in particular for peripheral details. For example, memory for the central character in the video was not affected by load but memory for a witness who passed by the window at the edge of the scene was significantly worse under high load. High load memories were also more open to suggestion, showing increased susceptibility to leading questions. High visual perceptual load also affected recall for auditory information, illustrating a possible cross-modal perceptual load effect on memory accuracy. These results have implications for eyewitness memory researchers and forensic professionals.

Perspectivas teóricas y evidencia empírica sobre la estructura de la inhibición

<p>Desde el punto de vista teórico la inhibición ha sido un mecanismo relevante para explicar cómo las personas seleccionan información relevante y descartan información irrelevante. A su vez, parece estar fuertemente implicada en el dominio y adquisición de competencias sociales, emocionales y comportamentales. De manera inversa,  los fallos en esta habilidad se asocian a diferentes síndromes y a la emergencia de comportamientos no deseados, como por ejemplo el abuso de sustancias, los problemas atencionales, el sobrepeso, entre otros.  Aunque, actualmente existe acuerdo sobre la importancia de la inhibición, existen divergencias en cuanto a su definición conceptual y operativa. Principalmente, existe un fuerte debate en torno a si la inhibición es un constructo unitario o debería fragmentarse en un conjunto de procesos. El objetivo de este  trabajo, es por tanto, describir los hallazgos y posturas más relevantes en relación a las problemáticas en el abordaje del constructo inhibitorio. Para ello, en primer lugar se expondrá una propuesta explicativa del control de la interferencia basada en un enfoque no inhibitorio. En segundo lugar, se describirán los modelos más representativos, de uno, dos y tres factores para finalmente, exponer algunos de los aportes y hallazgos propuestos como principal fuente de evidencia a favor del enfoque fragmentado.</p>

The effect of visual perceptual load on auditory awareness in autism spectrum disorder

Recent work on visual selective attention has shown that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) demonstrate an increased perceptual capacity. The current study examined whether increasing visual perceptual load also has less of an effect on auditory awareness in children with ASD. Participants performed either a high- or low load version of a line discrimination task. On a critical trial, an unexpected, task-irrelevant auditory stimulus was played concurrently with the visual stimulus. In contrast to typically developing (TD) children, children with ASD demonstrated similar detection rates across perceptual load conditions, and reported greater awareness than TD children in the high perceptual load condition. These findings suggest an increased perceptual capacity in children with ASD that operates across sensory modalities.

Two- and three-year-olds track a single meaning during word learning: Evidence for Propose-but-verify

A child word-learning experiment is reported that examines 2- and 3-year-olds' ability to learn the meanings of novel words across multiple, referentially ambiguous, word occurrences. Children were told they were going on an animal safari in which they would learn the names of unfamiliar animals. Critical trial sequences began with hearing a novel word (e.g., "I see a dax! Point to the dax!") while seeing photos of two unfamiliar animals. After responding and performing on two filler trials with known animals, participants encountered the novel word again ("I see another dax! Point to the dax!") in one of two experimental conditions. In the Same condition, participants saw the animal they pointed to previously when hearing "dax" alongside another unfamiliar animal that had been seen before but not paired with "dax". In the Switch condition, participants saw the animal they had not pointed to previously alongside the unfamiliar animal. Children were well above chance on Same trials, but at chance on Switch trials. Thus, although children could remember a previously selected referent and use it to inform later referent selection (Same condition), a potential referent that was not previously selected and merely co-occurred with the target word (Switch condition) was either not remembered, or simply deemed irrelevant to word meaning. This finding suggests young children do not store multiple possible meanings from a single word occurrence, but rather restrict learning to what they deemed to be the unique referent of the novel word in the moment, testing that word-meaning hypothesis on the next occurrence.

Alpha desynchronization and fronto-parietal connectivity during spatial working memory encoding deficits in ADHD: A simultaneous EEG-fMRI study

The underlying mechanisms of alpha band (8-12 Hz) neural oscillations are of importance to the functioning of attention control systems as well as to neuropsychiatric conditions that are characterized by deficits of that system, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The objectives of the present study were to test if visual encoding-related alpha event-related desynchronization (ERD) correlates with fronto-parieto-occipital connectivity, and whether this is disrupted in ADHD during spatial working memory (SWM) performance. We acquired EEG concurrently with fMRI in thirty boys (12-16 yrs. old, 15 with ADHD), during SWM encoding. Psychophysiological connectivity analyses indicated that alpha ERD during SWM encoding was associated with both occipital activation and fronto-parieto-occipital functional connectivity, a finding that expands on prior associations between alpha ERD and occipital activation. This finding provides novel support for the interpretation of alpha ERD (and the associated changes in occipital activation) as a phenomenon that involves, and perhaps arises as a result of, top-down network interactions. Alpha ERD was associated less strongly with occipital activity, but associated more strongly with fronto-parieto-occipital connectivity in ADHD, consistent with a compensatory attentional response. Additionally, we illustrate that degradation of EEG data quality by MRI-amplified motion artifacts is robust to existing cleaning algorithms and is significantly correlated with hyperactivity symptoms and the ADHD Combined Type diagnosis. We conclude that persistent motion-related MR artifacts in EEG data can increase variance and introduce bias in interpretation of group differences in populations characterized by hypermobility--a clear limitation of current-state EEG-fMRI methodology.

Effect of External Irrelevant Distracters on a Visual Search Test in School-Age Children: Computerized Assessment

OBJECTIVE

This study aimed to test the effect of an irrelevant external distracter included in a computer-administered visual search test. Two hypotheses were tested: (a) If the distracter affects performance, attention efficiency will be lowered; (b) if children do not habituate to the distracter, performance will be lower for every item of the test.

METHOD

Distraction was induced changing the screen color unexpectedly several times in each trial-450 children (225 girls and 225 boys) from second to sixth course were tested. This group was compared with a group of 423 children from the same age range who were tested with the same test without distraction.

RESULTS

Induced distraction reduced attention efficiency for all ages and for every trial in the treatment group (test with distraction). Speed was lower, but number of errors did not increase.

CONCLUSION

School-age children cope with an irrelevant external distracter by reducing speed, not accuracy.

Atypical sensory reactivity influences auditory attentional control in adults with autism spectrum disorders

Frequent observations of atypical sensory reactivity in people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) suggest that the perceptual experience of those on the Spectrum is dissimilar to neurotypicals. Moreover, variable attention abilities in people with ASD, ranging from good control to periods of high distractibility, may be related to atypical sensory reactivity. This study used auditory event-related potential (ERP) measures to evaluate top-down and bottom-up attentional processes as a function of perceptual load, and examined these factors with respect to sensory reactivity. Twenty-five age and IQ-matched participants (ASD: 22.5 year, SD = 4.1 year; Controls: 22.8 year, SD = 5.1 year) completed the Adolescent/Adult Sensory Profile prior to performing a modified 3-stimulus (target, non-target, and distractor) auditory oddball target detection task EEG was recorded during task completion. ERP analysis assessed early sensory processing (P50, ∼50 ms latency; N100, ∼100 ms latency), cognitive control (N200, ∼200 ms latency), and attentional processing (P3a and P3b, ∼300 ms latency). Behavioral data demonstrates participants with ASD and neurotypical performed similarly on auditory target detection, but diverged on sensory profiles. Target ERP measures associated with top-down control (P3b latency) significantly increased under greater load in controls, but not in participants with ASD. Early ERP responses associated with bottom-up attention (P50 amplitude) were positively correlated to increased sensory sensitivity. Findings suggest specific neural mechanisms for increased perceptual capacity and enhanced bottom-up processing of sensory stimuli in people with autism. Results from participants with ASD are consistent with load theory and enhanced perceptual functioning. Autism Res 2016, 9: 1079-1092. © 2016 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Audiovisual integration in children listening to spectrally degraded speech

PURPOSE

The study explored whether visual information improves speech identification in typically developing children with normal hearing when the auditory signal is spectrally degraded.

METHOD

Children (n=69) and adults (n=15) were presented with noise-vocoded sentences from the Children's Co-ordinate Response Measure (Rosen, 2011) in auditory-only or audiovisual conditions. The number of bands was adaptively varied to modulate the degradation of the auditory signal, with the number of bands required for approximately 79% correct identification calculated as the threshold.

RESULTS

The youngest children (4- to 5-year-olds) did not benefit from accompanying visual information, in comparison to 6- to 11-year-old children and adults. Audiovisual gain also increased with age in the child sample.

CONCLUSIONS

The current data suggest that children younger than 6 years of age do not fully utilize visual speech cues to enhance speech perception when the auditory signal is degraded. This evidence not only has implications for understanding the development of speech perception skills in children with normal hearing but may also inform the development of new treatment and intervention strategies that aim to remediate speech perception difficulties in pediatric cochlear implant users.

Is the impairment in temporal allocation of visual attention in children with ADHD related to a developmental delay or a structural cognitive deficit?

We investigated the temporal allocation of visual attention in 11-year-old children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) by comparing their attentional blink (AB) parameters (duration, amplitude and minimum performance) with those observed in three groups of healthy control participants (8-year-olds, 11-year-olds and adults). The AB is a marker of impaired ability to detect a second target following the identification of a first target when both appear randomly within a rapid sequence of distractor items. Our results showed developmental effects; with age, the AB duration decreased and the AB minimum moved to shorter lag times. Importantly, 11-year old children with ADHD presented much the same similar AB patterns (in terms of duration and minimum position) as the healthy 8-year-old controls. Our results support the hypothesis whereby impaired allocation of temporal selective attention in children with ADHD is due to a developmental delay and not a specific cognitive deficit.

The contribution of coping-related variables and heart rate variability to visual search performance under pressure

Visual search performance under pressure is explored within the predictions of the neurovisceral integration model. The experimental aims of this study were: 1) to investigate the contribution of coping-related variables to baseline, task, and reactivity (task-baseline) high-frequency heart rate variability (HF-HRV), and 2) to investigate the contribution of coping-related variables and HF-HRV to visual search performance under pressure. Participants (n=96) completed self-report measures of coping-related variables (emotional intelligence, coping style, perceived stress intensity, perceived control of stress, coping effectiveness, challenge and threat, and attention strategy) and HF-HRV was measured during a visual search task under pressure. The data show that baseline HF-HRV was predicted by a trait coping-related variable, task HF-HRV was predicted by a combination of trait and state coping-related variables, and reactivity HF-HRV was predicted by a state coping-related variable. Visual search performance was predicted by coping-related variables but not by HF-HRV.

Attention deficits and hyperactivity-impulsivity: what have we learned, what next?

The domains of self-regulation, self-control, executive function, inattention, and impulsivity cut across broad swathes of normal and abnormal development. Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder is a common syndrome that encompasses a portion of these domains. In the past 25 years research on attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder has been characterized by dramatic advances in genetic, neural, and neuropsychological description of the syndrome as well as clarification of its multidimensional phenotypic structure. The limited clinical applicability of these research findings poses the primary challenge for the next generation. It is likely that clinical breakthroughs will require further refinement in describing heterogeneity or clinical/biological subgroups, renewed focus on the environment in the form of etiological events as well as psychosocial contexts of development, and integration of both with biological understanding.

Sluggish cognitive tempo and its neurocognitive, social and emotive correlates: a systematic review of the current literature

OBJECTIVES

Since the elimination of items associated with Sluggish Cognitive Tempo (SCT) during the transition from DSM-III to DSM-IV from the diagnostic criteria of Attention-deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), interest in SCT and its associated cognitive as well as emotional and social consequences is on the increase. The current review discusses recent findings on SCT in clinical as well as community based ADHD populations. The focus is further on clinical correlates of SCT in populations different from ADHD, SCT's genetic background, SCT's association with internalizing and other behavioral comorbidities, as well as SCT's association with social functioning and its treatment efficacy.

METHOD

A systematic review of empirical studies on SCT in ADHD and other pathologies in PsycInfo, SocIndex, Web of Science and PubMed using the key terms "Sluggish Cognitive Tempo", "Cognitive Tempo", "Sluggish Tempo" was performed. Thirty-two out of 63 studies met inclusion criteria and are discussed in the current review.

RESULTS/CONCLUSION

From the current literature, it can be concluded that SCT is a psychometrically valid construct with additive value in the clinical field of ADHD, oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), internalizing disorders and neuro-rehabilitation. The taxonomy of SCT has been shown to be far from consistent across studies; however, the impact of SCT on individuals' functioning (e.g., academic achievement, social interactions) seems remarkable. SCT has been shown to share some of the genes with ADHD, however, related most strongly to non-shared environmental factors. Future research should focus on the identification of adequate SCT measurement to promote symptom tailored treatment and increase studies on SCT in populations different from ADHD.

I can see clearly now: the effects of age and perceptual load on inattentional blindness

Attention and awareness are known to be linked (e.g., see Lavie et al., 2014, for a review). However the extent to which this link changes over development is not fully understood. Most research concerning the development of attention has investigated the effects of attention on distraction, visual search and spatial orienting, typically using reaction time measures which cannot directly support conclusions about conscious awareness. Here we used Lavie's Load Theory of Attention and Cognitive Control to examine the development of attention effects on awareness. According to Load Theory, awareness levels are determined by the availability of attentional capacity. We hypothesized that attentional capacity develops with age, and consequently that awareness rates should increase with development due to the enhanced capacity. Thus we predicted that greater rates of inattentional blindness (IB) would be found at a younger age, and that lower levels of load will be sufficient to exhaust capacity and cause IB in children but not adults. We tested this hypothesis using an IB paradigm with adults and children aged 7-8, 9-10, 11-12 and 13 years old. Participants performed a line-length judgment task (indicating which arm of a cross is longer) and on the last trial were asked to report whether they noticed an unexpected task-irrelevant stimulus (a small square) in the display. Perceptual load was varied by changing the line-length difference (with a smaller difference in the conditions of higher load). The results supported our hypothesis: levels of awareness increased with age, and a moderate increase in the perceptual load of the task led to greater IB for children but not adults. These results extended across both peripheral and central presentations of the task stimuli. Overall, these findings establish the development of capacity for awareness and demonstrate the critical role of the perceptual load in the attended task.

When tonic cardiac vagal tone predicts changes in phasic vagal tone: the role of fear and perceptual load

We examined the relationship between tonic--a correlate of self-regulatory functioning--and phasic cardiac vagal activity (indexed by heart rate variability; HRV) during a selective attentional task with varying levels of load. Participants detected a target letter among letter strings superimposed on either fearful or neutral face distractors. Letter strings consisted of six target letters under low load and one target letter and five nontarget letters under high load. With fearful distractors, lower tonic HRV was associated with phasic HRV suppression, suggesting an autonomic stress response under both low and high load. In contrast, higher tonic HRV was associated with phasic HRV enhancement, suggesting greater self-regulatory effort under low load and an absence of phasic HRV suppression under high load. The current research suggests that tonic cardiac vagal tone is associated with the ability to flexibly adapt autonomic responses.

Visual search efficiency is greater for human faces compared to animal faces

The Animate Monitoring Hypothesis proposes that humans and animals were the most important categories of visual stimuli for ancestral humans to monitor, as they presented important challenges and opportunities for survival and reproduction; however, it remains unknown whether animal faces are located as efficiently as human faces. We tested this hypothesis by examining whether human, primate, and mammal faces elicit similar searches, or whether human faces are privileged. In the first three experiments, participants located a target (human, primate, or mammal face) among distractors (non-face objects). We found fixations on human faces were faster and more accurate than fixations on primate faces, even when controlling for search category specificity. A final experiment revealed that, even when task-irrelevant, human faces slowed searches for non-faces, suggesting some bottom-up processing may be responsible for the human face search efficiency advantage.

Mathematical anxiety effects on simple arithmetic processing efficiency: an event-related potential study

This study uses event-related brain potentials to investigate the difficulties that high math anxious individuals face when processing dramatically incorrect solutions to simple arithmetical problems. To this end, thirteen high math-anxious (HMA) and thirteen low math-anxious (LMA) individuals were presented with simple addition problems in a verification task. The proposed solution could be correct, incorrect but very close to the correct one (small-split), or dramatically incorrect (large-split). The two groups did not differ in mathematical ability or trait anxiety. We reproduced previous results for flawed scores suggesting HMA difficulties in processing large-split solutions. Moreover, large-split solutions elicited a late positive component (P600/P3b) which was more enhanced and delayed in the HMA group. Our study proposes that the pattern of flawed scores found by previous studies (and that we replicate) has to do with HMA individuals'difficulties in inhibiting an extended processing of irrelevant information (large-split solutions).

Effect of perceptual load on semantic access by speech in children

PURPOSE

To examine whether semantic access by speech requires attention in children.

METHOD

Children (N = 200) named pictures and ignored distractors on a cross-modal (distractors: auditory-no face) or multimodal (distractors: auditory-static face and audiovisual-dynamic face) picture word task. The cross-modal task had a low load, and the multimodal task had a high load (i.e., respectively naming pictures displayed on a blank screen vs. below the talker's face on his T-shirt). Semantic content of distractors was manipulated to be related vs. unrelated to the picture (e.g., picture "dog" with distractors "bear" vs. "cheese"). If irrelevant semantic content manipulation influences naming times on both tasks despite variations in loads, Lavie's (2005) perceptual load model proposes that semantic access is independent of capacity-limited attentional resources; if, however, irrelevant content influences naming only on the cross-modal task (low load), the perceptual load model proposes that semantic access is dependent on attentional resources exhausted by the higher load task.

RESULTS

Irrelevant semantic content affected performance for both tasks in 6- to 9-year-olds but only on the cross-modal task in 4- to 5-year-olds. The addition of visual speech did not influence results on the multimodal task.

CONCLUSION

Younger and older children differ in dependence on attentional resources for semantic access by speech.

Attention, task difficulty, and ADHD

Comments on analysis of attention tasks in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) provided by Wilding (2005) points out that whereas many regulatory functions, including alertness or arousal, appear to be impaired in ADHD, demonstrating basic attention deficits in selection or orienting functions in the disorder has proven difficult. Yet several issues remain to be addressed in the field with regard to attentional function in ADHD. These include the need for further scrutiny of effects of perceptual load, the psychometric problem of differential task difficulty and differential deficit, relative value of complex versus simple tasks, and consideration of heterogeneity in ADHD. Heterogeneity pertains both to additional analysis of ADHD subtypes, in light of speculation that the Inattentive type may be characterized by true attention problems, and to newer analyses of potential distinct etiological groups within subtype. New analyses of attentional operations have a role to play in these future directions.

Nonverbal spatially selective attention in 4- and 5-year-old children

Under some conditions 4- and 5-year-old children can differentially process sounds from attended and unattended locations. In fact, the latency of spatially selective attention effects on auditory processing as measured with event-related potentials (ERPs) is quite similar in young children and adults. However, it is not clear if developmental differences in the polarity, distribution, and duration of attention effects are best attributed to acoustic characteristics, availability of non-spatial attention cues, task demands, or domain. In the current study adults and children were instructed to attend to one of two simultaneously presented soundscapes (e.g., city sounds or night sounds) to detect targets (e.g., car horn or owl hoot) in the attended channel only. Probes presented from the same location as the attended soundscape elicited a larger negativity by 80 ms after onset in both adults and children. This initial negative difference (Nd) was followed by a larger positivity for attended probes in adults and another negativity for attended probes in children. The results indicate that the neural systems by which attention modulates early auditory processing are available for young children even when presented with nonverbal sounds. They also suggest important interactions between attention, acoustic characteristics, and maturity on auditory evoked potentials.

The role of selective attention on academic foundations: a cognitive neuroscience perspective

To the extent that selective attention skills are relevant for academic foundations and amenable to training, they represent an important focus for the field of education. Here, drawing on research on the neurobiology of attention, we review hypothesized links between selective attention and processing across three domains important to early academic skills. First, we provide a brief review of the neural bases of selective attention, emphasizing the effects of selective attention on neural processing, as well as the neural systems important to deploying selective attention and managing response conflict. Second, we examine the developmental time course of selective attention. It is argued that developmental differences in selective attention are related to the neural systems important for deploying selective attention and managing response conflict. In contrast, once effectively deployed, selective attention acts through very similar neural mechanisms across ages. In the third section, we relate the processes of selective attention to three domains important to academic foundations: language, literacy, and mathematics. Fourth, drawing on recent literatures on the effects of video-game play and mind-brain training on selective attention, we discuss the possibility of training selective attention. The final section examines the application of these principles to educationally-focused attention-training programs for children.

Development of implicit and explicit category learning

We present two studies that examined developmental differences in the implicit and explicit acquisition of category knowledge. College-attending adults consistently outperformed school-age children on two separate information-integration paradigms due to children's more frequent use of an explicit rule-based strategy. Accuracy rates were also higher for adults on a unidimensional rule-based task due to children's more frequent use of the irrelevant dimension to guide their behavior. Results across these two studies suggest that the ability to learn categorization structures may be dependent on a child's ability to inhibit output from the explicit system.

Os efeitos da idade na seleção de carga perceptual

Algumas pesquisas sugerem a existência de momentos distintos de maturação do sistema atentivo. O presente estudo investigou os padrões de seleção da informação visual através de uma tarefa de carga perceptual executada por três grupos etários: crianças, adultos e idosos. De maneira geral os resultados obtidos indicaram uma diminuição da eficiência no processo de seleção da informação em condições de baixa carga perceptual na população de idosos e uma diminuição da eficiência da seleção em condições de alta e baixa carga perceptual na população composta por crianças. Estes resultados sugerem a existência de padrões específicos na seleção da informação visual em função da idade e da carga perceptual a ser processada pelo sistema visual.