The neural mechanisms supporting visuospatial orienting and focusing were investigated by recording event-related potentials (ERPs) in a cued, line-orientation discrimination task. Search arrays flashed randomly in the left or right visual field and were preceded by peripheral cues that varied in validity (valid or invalid, with 50% each) and size (large or small, with 50% each). Facilitation o...

Humans must often focus attention onto relevant sensory signals in the presence of simultaneous irrelevant signals. This type of attention has been explored in vision with the N2pc component, and the present study sought to find an analogous auditory effect. In Experiment 1, two 750-ms sounds were presented simultaneously, one from each of two lateral speakers. On each trial, participants indic...

We examine a Bayesian approach for accommodating beliefs and preferences that are held with partial confidence. An important notion highlighted by the method is that additional modeling can be valuable when complete confidence is lacking. We develop a meta-decision-analytic approach to balance the benefits of additional modeling with associated costs. We show how the approach can be used during...

Behavior architectures are widely used to program interactive robots. In these architectures multiple behaviors are usually running concurrently so a mechanism for integrating the resulting actuation commands from these behaviors into actual actuation commands sent to the robot’s motor system must be faced. Different architectures proposed different action integration mechanisms that range from...

A variety of stimulus factors have been shown to influence the degree of leftward displacement of perceived line midpoint (i.e., pseudoneglect), which typifies the performance of normal subjects in line bisection tasks [M.E. McCourt & G. Jewell: Neuropsychologia 37, 843-855 (1999); G. Jewell & M.E. McCourt: Neuropsychologia 38, 93-110 (2000)]. One such factor is the position of lines within the...

Designing robotic controllers can quickly become a challenging problem. Indeed, such controllers have to face a huge number of possible inputs that can be noisy (e.g. think of visual inputs as furnished by cameras), to select actions among a continuous set, and to automatically adapt themselves to evolving or stochastic environmental conditions. In realworld robotic applications, it is difficul...

Various models of selective attention propose that greater attention is allocated toward target stimuli when conflicting distracters make selection more difficult, but compelling evidence to support this view is scarce. In the present experiment, 15 participants performed a cued global/local selective attention task while brain activity was recorded with event-related functional magnetic resona...

Abstract Human development and the importance of focusing on women’s participation has become one of the main concerns and issues attracting the attention of many people. In fact, many gender-related models and patterns have been proposed in this regard. Accordingly, this paper is an attempt to evaluate the effects of development process on women’s participation in Iran using an econometrics ...

Media multitasking has become nearly ubiquitous in the developed world. Higher self-reported media consistently been shown to relate attention problems, including symptoms of deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but magnitude this relationship is small and heterogeneous across studies. These findings have motivated calls for increased specificity research, moving beyond aggregated summaries b...