BACKGROUND A growing set of studies has shown a positive relationship between aerobic fitness and a broad array of cognitive functions. However, few studies have focused on sustained attention, which has been considered a fundamental cognitive process that underlies most everyday activities. The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of aerobic fitness as a key factor in sustained at...

Event-related potentials and behavioral measures were obtained from young and elderly subjects while they performed two different auditory delayed match-to-sample tasks. In each experiment, subjects had to indicate whether an initial and a subsequent test sound were identical in two different conditions: one filled with distracting tone pips and one with no distractors. Electrophysiologically, ...

E.A. Lopez-Poveda et al. (eds.), The Neurophysiological Bases of Auditory Perception, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-5686-6_50, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010 Abstract We present a pair of simultaneous behavioral-neurophysiological studies in human subjects, in which we manipulate subjects’ attention to different features of an auditory scene. In the first study, we embed a regular acousti...

Selectively attending to task-relevant sounds whilst ignoring background noise is one of the most amazing feats performed by the human brain. Here, we studied the underlying neural mechanisms by recording magnetoencephalographic (MEG) responses of 14 healthy human subjects while they performed a nearthreshold auditory discrimination task vs. a visual control task of similar difficulty. The audi...

We analyzed the relationship between several measures of attention (e.g., sustained and divided attention) and measures of verbal memory (e.g., immediate and delayed memory) in children aged 8-17 years. The attentional measures were derived from several tests of attention: Trail-Making, Digit Cancellation, Digit-Symbol, and Digit-Span. The verbal memory measures were derived from the Rey Audito...

This article reviews the effects of the thermal environment on vigilance. A reinterpretation of early and contemporary studies contradicts the existing notion that vigilance is facilitated in ambient temperatures that exceed a comfortable level. Rather, performance is degraded as thermal homeostasis of the observer is disturbed. Significant breakdown in capability becomes manifest with measurab...