Interference effects on threat words in anxious subjects on the emotional Stroop task have generally been interpreted as evidence for mood-congruent attentional bias in anxiety states. However, several recent studies have yielded results that run contrary to this attentional bias explanation. The most important of these conflicting findings show that: (1) panic disorder patients displayed inter...

More than one-third of all people are estimated to experience mild to severe cognitive impairment as they age. Acetylcholine (ACh) levels in the brain diminish with aging, and nicotinic ACh receptor (nAChR) stimulation is known to enhance cognitive performance. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is involved in a range of cognitive functions and is thought to mediate attentional focus. We found that mi...

Cognitive training has become a billion-dollar industry with the promise that exercising a cognitive faculty (e.g., attention) on simple "brain games" will lead to improvements on any task relying on the same faculty. Although this logic seems sound, it assumes performance improves on training tasks because attention's capacity has been enhanced. Alternatively, training may result in attentiona...

The Detection-Response Task is a method for assessing the attentional effects of cognitive load in a driving environment. Drivers are presented with a sensory stimulus every 3-5 s, and are asked to respond to it by pressing a button attached to their finger. Response times and hit rates are interpreted as indicators of the attentional effect of cognitive load. The stimuli can be visual, tactile...

Cancer survivors are exposed to several risk factors for cognitive dysfunction, such as general anesthesia, surgical trauma, and adjuvant therapies. In our recent study we showed that thalamic volume reduction and attentional dysfunction occurred shortly after surgery. Here, we examined the 6-month prognosis of the 20 patients with breast cancer who underwent surgery. Seven patients did not rec...

BACKGROUND Most studies examining psychotropic medication use on cognition in older persons with dementia include measures of global cognitive function. The present study examined the relationship between different types of psychotropic medication and specific cognitive functions in older people with dementia. METHODS Two hundred and six institutionalized older adults with dementia (180 women...

Tests evaluating the attentional-executive system are widely used in clinical practice. However, proximity of an objective cognitive test with real-world situations (ecological validity) is not frequently investigated. The present study evaluate the association between measures of the Five Digit Test (FDT) and the Oral Trails Test (OTT) with self-reported cognitive failures in everyday life as ...

Studies are reviewed that examine how perceptual and attentional systems operate in the cortically disconnected human. The data indicate that even though both simple and complex perceptual information associated with the cognitive activities of each disconnected half brain show virtually no interactions, the attentional system remains largely integrated in the split-brain patient. It also appea...

The attentional blink (AB) refers to the impairment in consciously perceiving the second of two targets presented in close temporal proximity (200 – 500ms) in a rapid serial visual presentation paradigm. The present paper is a preliminary report describing a conceptual and partially computational model of the AB based on the LIDA (Learning Intelligent Distribution Agent) cognitive architecture....