Cognitive theory from the field of general anxiety suggests that the tendency to display attentional bias toward negative information results in anxiety. Accordingly, the current study aims to investigate whether attentional bias is involved in math anxiety (MA) as well (i.e., a persistent negative reaction to math). Twenty seven participants (14 with high levels of MA and 13 with low levels of...

When an otherwise inconspicuous stimulus is learned to predict a reward, this stimulus will automatically capture visual attention. This learned attentional bias is not specific to the precise object previously associated with reward, but can be observed for different stimuli that share a defining feature with the reward cue. Under certain circumstances, value-driven attentional biases can even...

According to cognitive and neural theories of emotion, attentional processing of innate threat stimuli, such as angry facial expressions, is prioritised over neutral stimuli. To test this hypothesis, the present study used a modified version of the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm to investigate the effect of emotional face stimuli on the attentional blink (AB). The target stimu...

When the second of two targets (T2) is presented in close temporal proximity (within 200-500 ms) to the first (T1), the accuracy for reporting T2 is reduced relative to when the targets are separated by longer durations; this effect is known as the attentional blink (AB). Two recent studies have shown that individual differences in the magnitudes of the AB are stable both within a single testin...

17. LIMITATION OF ABSTRACT UU 15. NUMBER OF PAGES 5d. PROJECT NUMBER

When people monitor the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) of stimuli for two targets (T1 and T2), they often miss T2 if it falls into a time window of about half a second after T1 onset, a phenomenon known as the attentional blink (AB). We found that overall performance in an RSVP task was impaired by a concurrent short-term memory (STM) task and, furthermore, that this effect increased w...

When viewers search for targets in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream, if two targets are presented within about 500 msec of each other, the first target may be easy to spot but the second is likely to be missed. This phenomenon of attentional blink (AB) has been widely studied to probe the temporal capacity of attention for detecting visual targets. However, with the typical proc...

Input-control theories of the attentional blink (AB) suggest that this deficit results from impaired attentional selection caused by the post-Target 1 (T1) distractor (Di Lollo et al., 2005; Olivers et al., 2007). Accordingly, there should be no AB when there are no intervening distractors between the targets. Contrary to these hypotheses, Dux et al. (2008) observed an AB (T3 deficit) when thre...

Although perception is typically constrained by limits in available processing resources, these constraints can be overcome if information about environmental properties, such as the spatial location or expected onset time of an object, can be used to direct resources to particular sensory inputs. In this work, we examined these temporal expectancy effects in greater detail in the context of th...

We propose an implementation of covert attention mechanisms with spiking neurons. Spiking neural models describe the activity of a neuron with precise spike-timing rather than firing rate. We investigate the interests offered by such a temporal code for low-level vision and early attentional process. This paper describes a spiking neural network which achieves saliency extraction and stable att...