Revealing the effects of temporal orienting of attention on response conflict using continuous movements

Distinct Inhibitory-Control Processes Underlie Children's Judgments of Fairness

We examined how 5- to 8-year-olds (N = 51; Mage = 83 months; 27 female, 24 male; 69% White, 12% Black/African American, 8% Asian/Asian American, 6% Hispanic, 6% not reported) and adults (N = 18; Mage = 20.13 years; 11 female, 7 male) accepted or rejected different distributions of resources between themselves and others. We used a reach-tracking method to track finger movement in 3D space over time. This allowed us to dissociate two inhibitory processes. One involved pausing motor responses to detect conflict between observed information and how participants thought resources should be divided; the other involved resolving the conflict between the response and the alternative. Reasoning about disadvantageous inequities involved more of the first system, and this was stable across development. Reasoning about advantageous inequities involved more of the second system and showed more of a developmental progression. Generally, reach tracking offers an on-line measure of inhibitory control for the study of cognition.

Continuous action with a neurobiologically inspired computational approach reveals the dynamics of selection history

Everyday perception-action interaction often requires selection of a single goal from multiple possibilities. According to a recent framework of attentional control, object selection is guided not only by the well-established factors of perceptual salience and current goals but also by selection history. Yet, underlying mechanisms linking selection history and visually-guided actions are poorly understood. To examine such interplay and disentangle the impact of target and distractor history on action selection, we employed a priming-of-popout (PoP) paradigm combined with continuous tracking of reaching movements and computational modeling. Participants reached an odd-colored target among homogeneous distractors while we systematically manipulated the sequence of target and distractor colors from one trial to the next. We observed that current reach movements were significantly influenced by the interaction between attraction by the prior target feature and repulsion by the prior distractor feature. With principal component regression, we found that inhibition led by prior distractors influenced reach target selection earlier than facilitation led by the prior target. In parallel, our newly developed computational model validated that current reach target selection can be explained best by the mechanism postulating the preceded impact of previous distractors followed by a previous target. Such converging empirical and computational evidence suggests that the prior selection history triggers a dynamic interplay between target facilitation and distractor inhibition to guide goal-directed action successfully. This, in turn, highlights the necessity of an explicitly integrated approach to determine how visual attentional selection links with adaptive actions in a complex environment.

Attention in flux

Selective attention comprises essential infrastructural functions supporting cognition-anticipating, prioritizing, selecting, routing, integrating, and preparing signals to guide adaptive behavior. Most studies have examined its consequences, systems, and mechanisms in a static way, but attention is at the confluence of multiple sources of flux. The world advances, we operate within it, our minds change, and all resulting signals progress through multiple pathways within the dynamic networks of our brains. Our aim in this review is to raise awareness of and interest in three important facets of how timing impacts our understanding of attention. These include the challenges posed to attention by the timing of neural processing and psychological functions, the opportunities conferred to attention by various temporal structures in the environment, and how tracking the time courses of neural and behavioral modulations with continuous measures yields surprising insights into the workings and principles of attention.

Reciprocal facilitation between mental and visuomotor rotations

Humans exhibit remarkably complex cognitive abilities and adaptive behavior in daily life. Cognitive operation in the "mental workspace," such as mentally rotating a piece of luggage to fit into fixed trunk space, helps us maintain and manipulate information on a moment-to-moment basis. Skill acquisition in the "sensorimotor workspace," such as learning a new mapping between the magnitude of new vehicle movement and wheel turn, allows us to adjust our behavior to changing environmental or internal demands to maintain appropriate motor performance. While this cognitive and sensorimotor synergy is at the root of adaptive behavior in the real world, their interplay has been understudied due to a divide-and-conquer approach. We evaluated whether a separate domain-specific or common domain-general operation drives mental and sensorimotor rotational transformations. We observed that participants improved the efficiency of mental rotation speed after the visuomotor rotation training, and their learning rate for visuomotor adaptation also improved after their mental rotation training. Such bidirectional transfer between two widely different tasks highlights the remarkable reciprocal plasticity and demonstrates a common transformation mechanism between two intertwined workspaces. Our findings urge the necessity of an explicitly integrated approach to enhance our understanding of the dynamic interdependence between cognitive and sensorimotor mechanisms.