Diversion of Attention Leads to Conflict between Concurrently Attended Stimuli, Not Delayed Orienting to the Object of Interest.

The control processes that guide attention to a visual-search target can result in the selection of an irrelevant object with similar features (a distractor). Once attention is captured by such a distractor, search for a subsequent target is momentarily impaired if the two stimuli appear at different locations. The textbook explanation for this impairment is based on the notion of an indivisible focus of attention that moves to the distractor, illuminates a nontarget that subsequently appears at that location, and then moves to the target once the nontarget is rejected.

Brain Vital Signs Detect Cognitive Improvements During Combined Physical Therapy and Neuromodulation in Rehabilitation From Severe Traumatic Brain Injury: A Case Report.

Using a longitudinal case study design, we have tracked the recovery of motor function following severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) through a multimodal neuroimaging approach. In 2006, Canadian Soldier Captain (retired) Trevor Greene (TG) was attacked with an axe to the head while on tour in Afghanistan. TG continues intensive daily rehabilitation, which recently included the integration of physical therapy (PT) with neuromodulation using translingual neurostimulation (TLNS) to facilitate neuroplasticity.

Circadian misalignment impairs ability to suppress visual distractions.

Evening-type individuals often perform poorly in the morning because of a mismatch between internal circadian time and external social time, a condition recognized as social jet lag. Performance impairments near the morning circadian (~24 hr) trough have been attributed to deficits in attention, but the nature of the impairment is unknown. Using electrophysiological indices of attentional selection (N2pc) and suppression (P ), we show that evening-type individuals have a specific disability in suppressing irrelevant visual distractions.

Human translingual neurostimulation alters resting brain activity in high-density EEG.

Background: Despite growing evidence of a critical link between neuromodulation technologies and neuroplastic recovery, the underlying mechanisms of these technologies remain elusive.

Objective: To investigate physiological evidence of central nervous system (CNS) changes in humans during translingual neurostimulation (TLNS).

Methods: We used high-density electroencephalography (EEG) to measure changes in resting brain activity before, during, and after high frequency (HF) and low frequency (LF) TLNS.

Signal enhancement, not active suppression, follows the contingent capture of visual attention.

Irrelevant visual cues capture attention when they possess a task-relevant feature. Electrophysiologically, this contingent capture of attention is evidenced by the N2pc component of the visual event-related potential (ERP) and an enlarged ERP positivity over the occipital hemisphere contralateral to the cued location. The N2pc reflects an early stage of attentional selection, but presently it is unclear what the contralateral ERP positivity reflects.

Searching for inefficiency in visual search.

The time required to find an object of interest in the visual field often increases as a function of the number of items present. This increase or inefficiency was originally interpreted as evidence for the serial allocation of attention to potential target items, but controversy has ensued for decades. We investigated this issue by recording ERPs from humans searching for a target in displays containing several differently colored items.