abstract introduction. previous research has led to conflicting findings on whether patients with subclinical or clinical obsessive compulsive disorder (ocd) share an attentional bias for stimulies that are related to their current concerns, a finding that has been observed in other anxiety disorders. objectives. the present study aimed to determine whether there was a difference in attentional...

Although large variations in the magnitude of attentional capture have been evidenced across a wide range of studies and paradigms (see Burnham, 2007, for a review), the nature of these variations is unclear. In the present study, we used a modified spatial cuing task to address two related issues. In the first experiment, we explored the hypothesis that the magnitude of attentional capture var...

Traditionally, the visual enumeration of a small number of items (1 to about 4), referred to as subitizing, has been thought of as a parallel and pre-attentive process and functionally different from the serial attentive enumeration of larger numerosities. We tested this hypothesis by employing a dual task paradigm that systematically manipulated the attentional resources available to an enumer...

The detection of a salient visual target embedded in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) can be severely affected if target-like distractors are presented previously. This phenomenon, known as distractor-induced blindness (DIB), shares the prerequisites of contingent attentional capture (Folk, Remington, & Johnston, 1992). In both, target processing is transiently impaired by the presenta...

In a crowded visual scene, we typically employ attention to select stimuli that are behaviorally relevant. Two likely cortical sources of top-down attentional feedback to cortical visual areas are the prefrontal (PFC) and posterior parietal (PPC) cortices. Recent neurophysiological studies show that areas in PFC and PPC process signals about the locus of attention earlier than in extrastriate v...

A survey of the attention literature reveals the prominence of the attentional blink (AB)--a deficit in reporting the second of two targets when presented in close temporal succession. For two decades, this robust attentional phenomenon has been a major topic in attention research because it is informative about the rate at which stimuli can be encoded into consciously accessible representation...

Aims To examine whether a group of social drinkers showed longer response latencies to alcohol-related stimuli than neutral stimuli and to test whether exposure to 1) an alcohol-related environment and 2) consumption related cues influenced the interference from alcohol-related stimuli. Methods A 2 × 2 × 2 × 5 factorial design with Exposure Group (high, low) and Consumption Group (high, low) ...

Brain oscillations in various frequency bands have been shown to be an important means of enabling interarea communication for high-level cognitive performance. Interestingly, perturbation to such oscillations in the form of weak noise has been shown to benefit perception in tasks such as the attentional blink (AB). Here, we investigated perturbation intrinsic to the AB task in two conditions i...

We investigated whether symbolic endogenous attentional cues affect perceptual accuracy and reaction time (RT) via different cognitive and neural processes. We recorded magnetoencephalography in 19 humans while they performed a cued somatosensory discrimination task in which the cue-target interval was varied between 0 and 1000 ms. Comparing behavioral and neural measures, we show that (1) atte...