Emotionally significant objects and events in our environment attract attention based on their motivational relevance for survival. Such kind of emotional attention is thought to lead to affect-specific amplified processing that closely resembles effects of directed attention. Although there has been extensive research on prioritized processing of visual emotional stimuli, the spatio-temporal d...

It is generally accepted that during periods of attention to specific stimuli there are changes in the neural activity of central auditory structures; however, it is controversial whether attention can modulate auditory responses at the cochlear level. Several studies performed in animals as well as in humans have attempted to find a modulation of cochlear responses during visual attention with...

To investigate whether saccade preparation can modulate processing of auditory stimuli in a spatially-specific fashion, ERPs were recorded for a Saccade task, in which the direction of a prepared saccade was cued, prior to an imperative auditory stimulus indicating whether to execute or withhold that saccade. For comparison, we also ran a conventional Covert Attention task, where the same cue n...

This study examines the relationship between children's attention and comprehension of auditory and visual information on television. 60 5-year-olds viewed a videotape of "Sesame Street" and were then asked comprehension questions. Equal numbers of children viewed the television with (a) toys available to play with (the visual attention manipulation); (b) a record playing in the room (the audit...

We have been developing a system called DigitalReminder which enables to capture views when a user watched visual information with attention based on gaze detection. However, the acquisition of auditory information was not taken into account. This paper proposes a framework of detecting the user’s attention to auditory information by eye movement, which enables to record only the auditory infor...

background and aim: auditory processing disorders may have detrimental consequences on a child’s life, if undiagnosed and untreated. the multiple auditory processing assessment (mapa), as a valid model, has been introduced for central auditory processing assessment and diagnosis in school children. the purpose of this study was to design and evaluate the persian version of mapa for auditory pro...

The temporal orienting of attention refers to the process of focusing (neural) resources on a particular time point in order to boost the processing of and the responding to sensory events. Temporal attention is manipulated by varying the task-relevance of events at different time points or by inducing expectations that an event occurs at a particular time point. Notably, the electrophysiologic...

We examined changes in relative cerebral flood flow (relCBF) using PET during a sustained attention paradigm which included auditory stimulation and different tasks of mental counting. Ten normal volunteers underwent PET (15O water) during a baseline state and under experimental conditions which included listening to clicks, serial counting with auditory stimulation, counting with no auditory s...

Our nervous system is confronted with a barrage of sensory stimuli, but neural resources are limited and not all stimuli can be processed to the same extent. Mechanisms exist to bias attention toward the particularly salient events, thereby providing a weighted representation of our environment. Our understanding of these mechanisms is still limited, but theoretical models can replicate such a ...

Recent studies lead to the conclusion that focused attention, through the activity of corticofugal and medial olivocochlear (MOC) efferent pathways, modulates activity at the most peripheral aspects of the auditory system within the cochlea. In two experiments, we investigated the effects of different intermodal attention manipulations on the response of outer hair cells (OHCs), and the control...