Cognitive and behavioural responses to food reward, such as attentional biases and overeating, have been associated with individual differences in reward-responsiveness and impulsivity. This study investigated relationships between external eating, impulsivity and attentional bias to food cues, assessed using the pictorial visual-probe task. As previously reported, attentional bias correlated p...

Attentional control theory is an approach to anxiety and cognition representing a major development of Eysenck and Calvo's (1992) processing efficiency theory. It is assumed that anxiety impairs efficient functioning of the goal-directed attentional system and increases the extent to which processing is influenced by the stimulus-driven attentional system. In addition to decreasing attentional ...

The attentional blink (AB) is one impressive demonstration of limited attentional capacities in time: a second target (T2) is often missed when it should be detected within 200-600 ms after a first target. According to the dynamic attending theory, attention cycles oscillatory. Regular rhythms (i.e., pulses) should evoke expectations regarding the point of the next occurrence of a tone/element ...

The central thalamus plays an important role in the regulation of arousal and allocation of attentional resources in the performance of even simple tasks. To assess the contribution of central thalamic neurons to short-term adjustments of attentional effort, we analyzed 166 microelectrode recordings obtained from two rhesus monkeys performing a visuomotor simple reaction time task with a variab...

Many previous studies reported that the hyperpolarization of cortical neurons following cathodal stimulation (in transcranial direct current stimulation) has resulted in cognitive performance degradation. Here, we challenge this assumption by showing that cathodal stimulation will not always degrade cognitive performance. We used an attentional load paradigm in which irrelevant stimuli are proc...

Observers often miss a second target (T2) if it follows an identified first target item (T1) within half a second in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), a finding termed the attentional blink. If two targets are presented in immediate succession, however, accuracy is excellent (Lag 1 sparing). The resource sharing hypothesis proposes a dynamic distribution of resources over a time span of ...

The present study investigates how individuals distribute their attentional resources between a prospective memory task and an ongoing task. Therefore, metacognitive expectations about the attentional demands of the prospective-memory task were manipulated while the factual demands were held constant. In Experiments 1a and 1b, we found attentional costs from a prospective-memory task with low f...

A wealth of empirical evidence suggests that directing attention to temporal processing increases perceived duration, whereas drawing attention away from it has the opposite effect. Our work investigates this phenomenon by comparing perceived duration during a high attentional and a low attentional task in Alzheimer's Disease (AD) patients since these participants tend to show attentional defic...

We examined the attentional demands of the preparation process that intervenes a warning stimulus (S1) and a subsequent reaction stimulus (S2). Twelve participants performed a reaction task with a variable S1–S2 interval both with and without concurrent memory load that served to deplete attentional resources. We found that memory load did not modify the effect of the S1-S2 interval on reaction...

The attentional blink reflects the impaired ability to identify the 2nd of 2 targets presented in close succession--a phenomenon that is generally thought to reflect a fundamental cognitive limitation. However, the fundamental nature of this impairment has recently been called into question by the counterintuitive finding that task-irrelevant mental activity improves attentional blink performan...