Attentional effort relates to the allocation of limited-capacity attentional resources to meet current task demands and involves the activation of top-down attentional systems in the brain. Pupillometry is a sensitive measure of this intensity aspect of top-down attentional control. Studies relate pupillary changes in response to cognitive processing to activity in the locus coeruleus (LC), whi...

Previous studies have shown that working memory (WM) plays an important role in selective attention, sothat high WM load leads to inefficient distractor inhibition, in comparison with low WM load. In the present study, we examined the effect of WM on distractor processing while the extent of attentional focus was held constant. Our results show that WM load affected distractor processing only w...

Attentional bias for alcohol cues increases craving and subsequent alcohol consumption. Override processes can be used to disengage attention from alcohol cues. This requires self-control and implies that depletion of self-control would impair the ability to disengage attention from alcohol cues. This study examined the effect of self-control on attentional bias among male heavy drinkers. To ma...

The basal forebrain cholinergic system (BFCS) plays a role in several aspects of attentional function. Activation of this system by different afferent inputs is likely to influence how attentional resources are allocated. While it has been recognized for some time that the hypothalamus is a significant source of projections to the basal forebrain, the phenotype(s) of these inputs and the condit...

Although there is strong evidence that human decision-making is frequently self-biased, it remains unclear whether self-biases mediate attention. Here we review evidence on the relations between self-bias effects in decision-making and attention. We ask: Does self-related information capture attention? Do self-biases modulate pre-attentive processes or do they depend on attentional resources be...

Across different studies, patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) demonstrate impairments on numerous measures of attentional control that are classically associated with frontal lobe functioning. One aspect of attentional control that has not been examined in TLE is the ability to execute two modality-specific tasks concurrently. We sought to examine the status of dual-task coordination in ...

Substance-dependent patients automatically and involuntarily allocate their attention to drug cues in the environment, a process referred to as attentional bias. Attentional bias is increased during periods of subjective craving and predictive of treatment outcome and relapse in substance dependence. Despite recent theoretical and clinical advances with regard to attentional bias, the underlyin...

Selective attention in the presence of distraction is a key aspect of healthy cognition. The underlying neurobiological processes, have not, however, been functionally well characterized. In the present study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to determine how ecologically relevant distracting noise affects cortical activity in 27 healthy adults during two versions of the visual Sus...

Activation of the amygdala and the fusiform face area (FFA) are consistent findings in imaging studies on emotional face processing. There is evidence that these activations occur even when emotional faces are unattended; however, it was also shown that amygdala and FFA activation were modulated by the attentional resources allocated to these stimuli. Attentional resources might thereby not onl...

This study investigates how acoustic change-events are represented in a listener's brain when attention is strongly focused elsewhere. Using magneto-encephalography (MEG) we examine whether cortical responses to different kinds of changes in stimulus statistics are similarly influenced by attentional load, and whether the processing of such acoustic changes in auditory cortex depends on modalit...