Moderate movement, more vision: effects of physical exercise on inattentional blindness

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation over the Right Inferior Parietal Cortex Reduces Transposition Errors in a Syllabic Reordering Task

Evidence derived from functional imaging and brain-lesion studies has shown a strong left lateralization for language, and a complementary right hemisphere dominance for visuospatial abilities. Nevertheless, the symmetrical functional division of the two hemispheres gives no reason for the complexity of the cognitive operations involved in carrying out a linguistic task. In fact, a growing number of neuroimaging and neurostimulation studies suggest a possible right hemisphere involvement in language processing. The objective of this work was to verify the contribution of the left and right parietal areas in a phonological task. We applied anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to the right or left inferior parietal lobe, during a syllabic reordering task. After having learnt a combination of images of real objects and trisyllabic pseudowords with a simple consonant–vowel (CV) syllabic structure (e.g., tu-ru-cu), participants were shown the same images paired to two different pseudowords: one correct but with transposed syllables, and one alternative, never before seen. The participant’s task was to orally produce the chosen pseudoword, after having rearranged the order of its syllables. Two types of error were considered: transposition (correct pseudoword but incorrectly reordered) and identity (incorrect pseudoword). The results showed that right anodal stimulation significantly reduced the number of transposition errors, whereas left anodal stimulation significantly reduced the number of identity errors. These results suggested that both left and right inferior parietal areas were differentially involved in a syllabic reordering task, and, crucially, they demonstrated that visuospatial processes served by the right inferior parietal area could be competent for establishing the correct syllabic order within a word.

Position-Specific Attentional Skills in Team Sports: A Comparison between Defensive and Offensive Football Players

Over the last few decades, technical as well as cognitive skills and their relation to position-specific skill requirements have been extensively investigated as indicators for players’ performance in team sports. To explore the impact of positioning in football on inattentional blindness we employed dynamic tasks that presented an unexpected object and analyzed its noticing rates in three different experiments. In Experiment 1, amateur and expert football players performed a well-established inattentional blindness task of counting the number of times a basketball was passed between two groups while an unexpected, non-sport specific object was introduced to the situation. Noticing rates were higher for strikers compared to players of other playing positions. The findings support a position-specific advantage regarding inattentional blindness for more offensive players compared to more defensive players. Using the same inattentional blindness task, this finding was investigated in Experiment 2 in more detail, i.e., by differentiating between more playing positions. Results revealed that offensive players (in particular strikers) observed unexpected objects more frequently than defensive players. Experiment 3 used a newly developed football-specific task requiring participants to find solutions in different game situations with an unexpected free-standing player appearing in one of these situations. Defensive players again showed more inattentional blindness than offensive players (in particular offensive mid-fielders), i.e., offensive players perceived the unmarked player more often. This indicates that players not only differ in the conscious perception of unexpected objects that are irrelevant to the sport as a function of their playing position, but also show differences when the perception of the unexpected relevant object is useful for finding tactical solutions in a given game situation. Our findings provide further insight into the importance of the definition of position-specific skill requirements in team sports.

The Dynamic and Fragile Nature of Eyewitness Memory Formation: Considering Stress and Attention

Eyewitnesses are often susceptible to recollection failures and memory distortions. These failures and distortions are influenced by several factors. The present review will discuss two such important factors, attention failures and stress. We argue that acute stress, often experienced by eyewitnesses and victims of crimes, directly influences attentional processes, which likely has downstream consequences for memory. Attentional failures may result in individuals missing something unusual or important in a complex visual field. Amongst eyewitnesses, this can lead to individuals missing details, even unusual or important central details, regarding the crime. Surprisingly, few studies have investigated attentional failures in eyewitness scenarios, and none have investigated the relationship between stress, attention, and witness memory. This review will discuss the impact of attentional failures, mainly those resulting from inattentional blindness, in applied contexts in order to bridge to eyewitness scenarios. In addition, we will integrate the applied literature on attentional failures with literature that examines the influences of arousal and stress on attention. We will conclude by presenting how future research may tease apart the independent contributions of arousal and stress on attentional failures and successes and how this research may inform understanding of eyewitness reliability.

Inattentional blindness on the full-attention trial: Are we throwing out the baby with the bathwater?

When attention is otherwise engaged, observers may experience inattentional blindness, failing to notice objects or events that are presented in plain sight. In an inattentional blindness experiment, an unexpectedstimulus ispresented alongside primary-task stimuli, and its detection is probed. We evaluate a criterion that is commonly used to exclude observers from the data analysis. On the final experimental trial, observers do not perform the primary task, but instead look for anything new. Observers who fail to report the unexpected stimulus on thisfull-attention trialare excluded. On the basis of 4 hypothetical experiments and a review of 128 actual experiments from the literature, we demonstrate some potentially problematic consequences of implementing the full-attention-trial exclusion criterion. Excluded observers may cluster in experimental conditions and the exclusion criterion may lead researchers to understate the pervasiveness of inattentional blindness. It may even render usblindto inattentional blindness on the full-attention trial.

Exercise-Induced Physiological Arousal Biases Attention Toward Threatening Scene Details

The present experiment examined whether physiological arousal induced by acute bouts of aerobic exercise would influence attention and memory for scenes depicting or not depicting weapons. In a repeated-measures design, participants exercised at either low or high exertion levels. During exercise, they were presented with images, some of which depicted weapons; immediately following exercise, they completed a recognition test for portions of central and peripheral scene regions. Two primary results emerged. First, in the low exertion condition, we replicated extant research showing inferior peripheral scene memory when images contained, versus did not contain, weapons. Second, the high exertion condition increased central scene memory relative to low exertion, and this effect was specific to images containing weapons. Thus, we provide evidence for accentuated weapon focus effects during states of exercise-induced physiological arousal. These results contribute new applied and theoretical understandings regarding the interactions between physiological state, breadth of attention, and memory.

Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst

Zusammenfassung. Wenn wir unsere Aufmerksamkeit einer Aufgabe zuwenden, nehmen wir Dinge, die währenddessen unerwartet auftauchen, häufig nicht bewusst wahr – obwohl sie unmittelbar in unserem Blickfeld erscheinen. Dieses Phänomen, das als Inattentional Blindness bezeichnet wird, kann fatale Konsequenzen in alltäglichen Situationen und auch einen ernstzunehmenden Einfluss auf sportliche Leistungen haben. In Ergänzung zu vorheriger Forschung zeigen meine eigenen Ergebnisse, dass eine Vielzahl situativer Faktoren die Wahrscheinlichkeit, mit der Inattentional Blindness auftritt, beeinflussen können. Dazu zählen unter anderem bestimmte Eigenschaften des unerwarteten Objekts sowie Kontextfaktoren. Im Gegensatz dazu scheinen interindividuelle Unterschiede über die situativen Einflüsse hinaus kaum (oder zumindest nicht reliabel) vorherzusagen, ob Inattentional Blindness auftritt oder nicht. Während es also eine feste Wahrscheinlichkeit über alle Personen hinweg gibt, dass ein unerwartetes Objekt bemerkt wird (deterministischer Aspekt), kann anhand der Persönlichkeitsstruktur und der kognitiven Fähigkeiten dieser Personen nicht vorhergesagt werden, wer von ihnen das unerwartete Objekt entdecken wird und wer nicht (stochastischer Aspekt).

Physical Load Affects Perceptual-Cognitive Performance of Skilled Athletes: a Systematic Review

Background

Many researchers have considered the impact of physical exercise on perceptual-cognitive performance. There have also been a substantial number of studies that have examined how perceptual-cognitive skills differ between elite athletes and non-athletes. However, the knowledge on how physical exercise interacts with perceptual-cognitive skill is limited.

This systematic review aims to provide detailed information on how athletes’ perceptual-cognitive performance is influenced by acute physical exercise load and whether these effects differ between elite athletes and lesser skilled groups.

Methods

A systematic review was conducted using different combinations of the keywords physical load, acute, exercise, perception, cognition, perceptual, cognitive, sport, and athlete with the PubMed and SportDiscus databases. Additional articles were found through screening the references of these papers.

Articles had to (a) be full journal articles written in English, (b) include an athlete sample, (c) examine acute effects of physical exercise, and (d) measure a perceptual-cognitive task as the dependent variable.

Results

Twenty-six articles matched the inclusion criteria. Results suggested the impact of acute physical exercise on perceptual-cognitive performances of athletes depends on the specificity of the induced exercise and perceptual-cognitive task. Additionally, speed and accuracy were influenced differently by physical exercise. Furthermore, skilled athletes seem to be more positively influenced by acute physical exercise than novices.

Conclusion

Since many factors influence perceptual-cognitive expertise, future research should be highly precise (e.g., regarding the definition of variables, the intensity of the physical exercise) and specific (e.g., regarding the tasks used, the type of the physical exercise).

The Influence of Attention Set, Working Memory Capacity, and Expectations on Inattentional Blindness

The probability of inattentional blindness, the failure to notice an unexpected object when attention is engaged on some primary task, is influenced by contextual factors like task demands, features of the unexpected object, and the observer’s attention set. However, predicting who will notice an unexpected object and who will remain inattentionally blind has proven difficult, and the evidence that individual differences in cognition affect noticing remains ambiguous. We hypothesized that greater working memory capacity might modulate the effect of attention sets on noticing because working memory is associated with the ability to focus attention selectively. People with greater working memory capacity might be better able to attend selectively to target items, thereby increasing the chances of noticing unexpected objects that were similar to the attended items while decreasing the odds of noticing unexpected objects that differed from the attended items. Our study ( N = 120 participants) replicated evidence that task-induced attention sets modulate noticing but found no link between noticing and working memory capacity. Our results are largely consistent with the idea that individual differences in working memory capacity do not predict noticing of unexpected objects in an inattentional blindness task.

Inattentional Blindness and Individual Differences in Cognitive Abilities

People sometimes fail to notice salient unexpected objects when their attention is otherwise occupied, a phenomenon known as inattentional blindness. To explore individual differences in inattentional blindness, we employed both static and dynamic tasks that either presented the unexpected object away from the focus of attention (spatial) or near the focus of attention (central). We hypothesized that noticing in central tasks might be driven by the availability of cognitive resources like working memory, and that noticing in spatial tasks might be driven by the limits on spatial attention like attention breadth. However, none of the cognitive measures predicted noticing in the dynamic central task or in either the static or dynamic spatial task. Only in the central static task did working memory capacity predict noticing, and that relationship was fairly weak. Furthermore, whether or not participants noticed an unexpected object in a static task was only weakly associated with their odds of noticing an unexpected object in a dynamic task. Taken together, our results are largely consistent with the notion that noticing unexpected objects is driven more by stochastic processes common to all people than by stable individual differences in cognitive abilities.

Inattentional blindness is influenced by exposure time not motion speed

Inattentional blindness is a striking phenomenon in which a salient object within the visual field goes unnoticed because it is unexpected, and attention is focused elsewhere. Several attributes of the unexpected object, such as size and animacy, have been shown to influence the probability of inattentional blindness. At present it is unclear whether or how the speed of a moving unexpected object influences inattentional blindness. We demonstrated that inattentional blindness rates are considerably lower if the unexpected object moves more slowly, suggesting that it is the mere exposure time of the object rather than a higher saliency potentially induced by higher speed that determines the likelihood of its detection. Alternative explanations could be ruled out: The effect is not based on a pop-out effect arising from different motion speeds in relation to the primary-task stimuli (Experiment 2), nor is it based on a higher saliency of slow-moving unexpected objects (Experiment 3).

Some See It, Some Don't: Exploring the Relation between Inattentional Blindness and Personality Factors

Human awareness is highly limited, which is vividly demonstrated by the phenomenon that unexpected objects go unnoticed when attention is focused elsewhere (inattentional blindness). Typically, some people fail to notice unexpected objects while others detect them instantaneously. Whether this pattern reflects stable individual differences is unclear to date. In particular, hardly anything is known about the influence of personality on the likelihood of inattentional blindness. To fill this empirical gap, we examined the role of multiple personality factors, namely the Big Five, BIS/BAS, absorption, achievement motivation, and schizotypy, in these failures of awareness. In a large-scale sample (N = 554), susceptibility to inattentional blindness was associated with a low level of openness to experience and marginally with a low level of achievement motivation. However, in a multiple regression analysis, only openness emerged as an independent, negative predictor. This suggests that the general tendency to be open to experience extends to the domain of perception. Our results complement earlier work on the possible link between inattentional blindness and personality by demonstrating, for the first time, that failures to consciously perceive unexpected objects reflect individual differences on a fundamental dimension of personality.