Unraveling psychological burden: the interplay of socio-economic status, anxiety sensitivity, intolerance of uncertainty, and stress in first-year medical students.

Background: The escalating prevalence of mental health issues among young adults, set against the backdrop of a global healthcare system under pressure, underscores the necessity for cultivating a resilient medical workforce. This study investigates the influence of socio-economic status (SES) on psychological well-being, with a particular focus on Anxiety Sensitivity (AS) and Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU) among first-year medical students. Understanding the psychological dimensions affecting medical students is crucial for fostering a future medical workforce that is both capable and mentally healthy.

Measuring visual search and distraction in immersive virtual reality.

An important issue of psychological research is how experiments conducted in the laboratory or theories based on such experiments relate to human performance in daily life. Immersive virtual reality (VR) allows control over stimuli and conditions at increased ecological validity. The goal of the present study was to accomplish a transfer of traditional paradigms that assess attention and distraction to immersive VR.

Effects of absolute luminance and luminance contrast on visual search in low mesopic environments.

Diverse adaptive visual processing mechanisms allow us to complete visual search tasks in a wide visual photopic range (>0.6 cd/m). Whether search strategies or mechanisms known from this range extend below, in the mesopic and scotopic luminance spectra (<0.

Female vs. Male Ampelmännchen-Gender-Specific Reaction Times to Male and Female Traffic Light Figures.

Traffic signs are important visual guiding signals for the safe navigation through complex road traffic. Interestingly, there is little variation in the traffic signs for cars around the world. However, remarkable variation exists for pedestrian traffic signs.

Effects of absolute luminance and luminance contrast on visual discrimination in low mesopic environments.

Recent research revealed considerable decline in visual perception under low luminance conditions. However, systematic studies on how visual performance is affected by absolute luminance and luminance contrast under low mesopic conditions (<0.5 cd/m) is lacking.

Attention and control of manual responses in cognitive conflict: Findings from TMS perturbation studies.

The article reviews studies that have used the perturbation approach of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) to assess the control of attention and manual response selection in conflict situations as elicited in three established paradigms: the Simon paradigm, the Flanker paradigm, and the Stroop paradigm. After describing the experimental conflict paradigms and briefly introducing TMS we review evidence for the involvement of different frontal and parietal cortical regions in the control of attention and response selection. For example, areas such as the frontal eye field (FEF) appear to significantly contribute to the encoding of spatial attributes of stimuli and areas of the parietal cortex, such as angular gyrus (AG), mediate the allocation of spatial attention and orienting.

Effects of spatial, temporal and spatiotemporal cueing are alike when attention is directed voluntarily.

Visual cues that allow predicting location and onset of a stimulus facilitate orienting. In a seminal study, Coull and Nobre (J Neurosci 18:7426-7435, 1998) adapted the spatial cueing paradigm to investigate temporal orienting. Recent research in the spatial domain suggests though that the cues used in the spatial and temporal conditions were not comparable.

Attention and ageing: Measuring effects of involuntary and voluntary orienting in isolation and in combination.

The cueing paradigm provides an established method for eliciting involuntary and voluntary attention shifts. Involuntary orienting is traditionally measured with non-predictive peripheral cues and voluntary orienting with predictive central arrows. Recent studies with young adults have established that predictive central arrows trigger a combination of involuntary and voluntary orienting, raising the possibility that previous studies - including those with older adults - misinterpreted their findings with central arrow cues as isolating the effects of voluntary attention.

Measuring effects of voluntary attention: a comparison among predictive arrow, colour, and number cues.

The Posner cueing paradigm is one of the most widely used paradigms in attention research. Importantly, when employing it, it is critical to understand which type of orienting a cue triggers. It has been suggested that large effects elicited by predictive arrow cues reflect an interaction of involuntary and voluntary orienting.

Should I stay or should I go--cognitive conflict in multi-attribute signals probed with East and West German 'Ampelmännchen' traffic signs.

In post-unification Germany, lingering conflicts between East and West Germans have found some unusual outlets, including a debate of the relative superiority of East and West German 'Ampelmännchen' pedestrian traffic signs. In our study, we probed the visual efficacy of East and West German Ampelmännchen signs with a Stroop-like conflict task. We found that the distinctive East German man-with-hat figures were more resistant to conflicting information, and in turn produced greater interference when used as distractors.

Influence of stimulus type on effects of flanker, flanker position, and trial sequence in a saccadic eye movement task.

Using the flanker paradigm in a task requiring eye movement responses, we examined how stimulus type (arrows vs. letters) modulated effects of flanker and flanker position. Further, we examined trial sequence effects and the impact of stimulus type on these effects.

Measuring the allocation of attention in the Stroop task: evidence from eye movement patterns.

Attention plays a crucial role in the Stroop task, which requires attending to less automatically processed task-relevant attributes of stimuli and the suppression of involuntary processing of task-irrelevant attributes. The experiment assessed the allocation of attention by monitoring eye movements throughout congruent and incongruent trials. Participants viewed two stimulus arrays that differed regarding the amount of items and their numerical value and judged by manual response which of the arrays contained more items, while disregarding their value.

Attention to faces: effects of face inversion.

Attention may be biased towards faces but a face advantage may be linked to the upright orientation of a face. Three experiments, employing a flanker and a cuing paradigm, investigated effects of face orientation, perceptual load and allocation of attention. Experiment 1 demonstrated that, irrespective of load, attention is biased towards upright face distractors while inverted face distractors are easy to ignore.

Effects of aging on switching the response direction of pro- and antisaccades.

The present study investigated effects of task switching between pro- and antisaccades and switching the direction of these saccades (response switching) on performance of younger and older adults. Participants performed single-task blocks, in which only pro- or only antisaccades had to be made as well as mixed-task blocks, in which pro- and antisaccades were required. Analysis of specific task switch effects in the mixed-task blocks showed switch costs for error rates for prosaccades for both groups, suggesting that antisaccade task rules persisted and affected the following prosaccade.

Contributions of human parietal and frontal cortices to attentional control during conflict resolution: a 1-Hz offline rTMS study.

Various brain regions contribute to aspects of attentional control in conflict resolution. Here, we used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to examine the functions of posterior parietal cortex (PPC) and dorsal medial frontal cortex (dMFC) in a visual flanker task. Participants responded to a central target that was flanked by congruent, neutral or incongruent stimuli on the left or right.

Involuntary but not voluntary orienting contributes to a disengage deficit in visual neglect.

Patients with left neglect are particularly slow to respond to visual targets on their left when attention is first engaged to their right. This deficit is known as the disengage deficit (DD). Studies investigating the DD typically employ nonpredictive peripheral onset cues to measure involuntary orienting and predictive central arrow cues to measure voluntary orienting.

Non-lateralised deficits in anti-saccade performance in patients with hemispatial neglect.

We tested patients suffering from hemispatial neglect on the anti-saccade paradigm to assess voluntary control of saccades. In this task participants are required to saccade away from an abrupt onset target. As has been previously reported, in the pro-saccade condition neglect patients showed increased latencies towards targets presented on the left and their accuracy was reduced as a result of greater undershoot.

Take a look at the bright side: effects of contrast polarity on gaze direction judgments.

Observers are inaccurate when judging the gaze direction of eyes shown in negative rather than positive polarity. On the basis of this polarity effect, it has been proposed that gaze is perceived as directed from the dark part of the eye. Our experiment investigated whether direction judgments simply follow this heuristic, as has been suggested.

Impaired orientation processing in hemispatial neglect.

Patients with hemispatial neglect show deficits in size perception. We investigated how this effect would be modulated by a change in object orientation. Seven right-hemisphere-lesioned patients, with and without neglect, and a control group, were asked to indicate which one of two bilaterally presented lines was longer, shorter or the same.

Characterizing exploration behavior in spatial neglect: omissions and repetitive search.

In search tasks, patients with spatial neglect typically fail to respond to stimuli on the contralesional side. Such behavior has been associated with hyperattention to the ipsilesional side and a deficit in disengaging from attended stimuli. The present study investigated whether such explanations can also account for a further kind of behavior frequently shown by neglect patients: repetitive returns to previously indicated stimuli, particularly on the ipsilesional side.

Classification images of two right hemisphere patients: a window into the attentional mechanisms of spatial neglect.

While spatial neglect most commonly occurs after right hemisphere lesions, damage to diverse areas within the right hemisphere may lead to neglect, possibly through different mechanisms. To identify potentially different causes of neglect, the visual information used (the 'perceptual template') in a cueing task was estimated with a novel technique known as 'classification images' for five normal observers and two male patients with right-hemisphere lesions and previous histories of spatial neglect (CM, age 85; HL, age 69). Observers made a yes/no decision on the presence of a 'White X' checkerboard signal (1.

Modulation of antisaccades by transcranial magnetic stimulation of the human frontal eye field.

It has been suggested that the frontal eye field (FEF), which is involved with the inhibition and generation of saccades, is engaged to a different degree in pro- and antisaccades. Pro- and antisaccades are often assessed in separate experimental blocks. In such cases, saccade inhibition is required for antisaccades but not for prosaccades.

Comparison of the Milner and Bisiach Landmark Tasks: can neglect patients be classified consistently?

The aim of the presented studies was to investigate whether classifications of neglect patients into perceptual (i.e. identifying a patient as suffering from mainly attentional/space representation deficits) and premotor (judging the main impairment to be related towards actions into contralesional space) categories are consistent across similar Landmark techniques that have, in the past, been designed to tease these potentially overlapping aspects of hemispatial neglect apart.

The effect of hemispatial neglect on the perception of centre.

Highly variable bisection performance in neglect patients has been attributed to an increased 'zone of indifference'. The indifference zone indicates the discrepancy between two line lengths which are judged as equal in length. Following this argumentation, the central area of a line should be expanded in neglect patients.

Integration of competing saccade programs.

Reflexive responses are often in direct competition with voluntary control. We test two opposing explanations for how this competition is resolved with respect to eye movements. One states that the quickest activation wins.