Effects of bottom-up and top-down attentional processes on change blindness for COVID-related stimuli: influence of heart rate variability.

Introduction: Top-down mechanisms that regulate attentional control are influenced by task demands and individuals' goals, while bottom-up processes are influenced by salient stimuli. Analogous networks are involved in both processes (e.g.

Adapting Minds: Exploring Cognition to Threatened Stimuli in the Post-COVID-19 Landscape Comparing Old and New Concerns about Pandemic.

The global population has been significantly affected by the pandemic in terms of physical and mental health. According to transactional theory, individuals have undergone an adaptation process influenced by cognitive control abilities. Emotional responses to COVID-19-related stimuli may interfere with top-down attentional processes, thereby hindering adaptation.

The mechanisms of selective attention in phenomenal consciousness.

In three experiments we investigated the effects of selective attention in iconic memory and fragile-visual short-term memory (VSTM), which have been related to phenomenal consciousness. We used a novel retro-cue paradigm with different delays (early vs late) and object priorities (high vs equal vs low), to investigate (a) attentional costs and benefits and the role of (b) bottom-up factors and (c) fragile-VSTM in feature-based attentional selection. Experiment 1 showed that attentional costs modulate visual maintenance at longer delays, while Experiment 2 showed that by reducing the time exposure of the memory array from 250 ms to 100 ms, as a bottom-up factor, participants were not able to select the objects based on their priorities.

The Cognitive Consequences of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Members of the General Population in Italy: A Preliminary Study on Executive Inhibition.

The pandemic period which has characterized the last two years has been associated with increasingly worsening psychological conditions, and previous studies have reported severe levels of anxiety, mood disorder, and psychopathological alteration in the general population. In particular, worldwide populations have appeared to present post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS). Surprisingly, no studies have evaluated the effect of COVID-related PTSS on cognitive functioning.

The Night Side of Blood Pressure: Nocturnal Blood Pressure Dipping and Emotional (dys)Regulation.

The dipping phenomenon is a physiological drop in blood pressure (around 10-20%) during sleep and represents an event related to the circadian blood pressure trend. This phenomenon, in some cases, is characterized by some alterations that can be expressed by an increase (extreme dipping), a decrease (non-dipping), or a reverse (i.e.

Empirical Evidence for Intraspecific Multiple Realization?

Despite the remarkable advances in behavioral and brain sciences over the last decades, the mind-body (brain) problem is still an open debate and one of the most intriguing questions for both cognitive neuroscience and philosophy of mind. Traditional approaches have conceived this problem in terms of a contrast between physicalist monism and Cartesian dualism. However, since the late sixties, the landscape of philosophical views on the problem has become more varied and complex.

The Night Effect of Anger: Relationship with Nocturnal Blood Pressure Dipping.

Introduction: The circadian pattern of blood pressure is characterized by a physiological drop occurring after sleep onset. The alteration of this phenomenon (non-dipping, extreme dipping, or reverse dipping) is associated with an increased cardiovascular risk. Besides altered autonomic and endocrine circadian rhythms, psychological aspects seem to play a role in this modification.

Visual Attention Modulates Phenomenal Consciousness: Evidence From a Change Detection Study.

The distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness has been influential in the field of consciousness studies. Both Block and Lamme proposed that access consciousness, or narrow cognitive accessibility, is related to a limited capacity working memory, and that phenomenal consciousness, or broad cognitive accessibility, is related to iconic memory or, more recently, to a fragile (intermediate) short-term memory store with a larger capacity than working memory. They have also highlighted the preattentive nature of phenomenal consciousness and of the related iconic and fragile visual short-term stores, thus selectively linking attention with access consciousness, in line with Baars and Dehaene, among others.

The 'Enfacement' illusion: A window on the plasticity of the self.

Understanding how self-representation is built, maintained and updated across the lifespan is a fundamental challenge for cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Studies demonstrate that the detection of body-related multisensory congruency builds bodily and facial self-representations that are crucial to developing self-recognition. Studies showing that the bodily self is more malleable than previously believed were mainly concerned with full-bodies and non-facial body parts.

Perceptual integration and attention in human extrastriate cortex.

Visual crowding is a perceptual phenomenon with far-reaching implications in both perceptual (e.g., object recognition and reading) and clinical (e.

Agnosic vision is like peripheral vision, which is limited by crowding.

Visual agnosia is a neuropsychological impairment of visual object recognition despite near-normal acuity and visual fields. A century of research has provided only a rudimentary account of the functional damage underlying this deficit. We find that the object-recognition ability of agnosic patients viewing an object directly is like that of normally-sighted observers viewing it indirectly, with peripheral vision.

Action imitation changes perceptual alternations in binocular rivalry.

Binocular rivalry is a visual phenomenon in which perception alternates between two different monocular images presented to each of the two eyes. Here, we propose using this phenomenon as a method to study the relation between action execution and action perception. In our experiment, a simple background (a checkerboard) was contrasted with a video representing a hand continuously grasping and releasing a ball.

Orienting and alerting: effect of 24 h of prolonged wakefulness.

It is well known that a decrease in vigilance can easily occur during 24 h of continuous wakefulness, but no study has assessed whether and in what way extended wakefulness might affect spatial orienting. In other words, it is not clear what happens when a subject has to orient his attention during a state of poor vigilance, resulting from sleep loss or sustained wakefulness. The aim of this study was to investigate this issue.

Word length effect in early reading and in developmental dyslexia.

Vocal reaction times were measured in Italian dyslexics and in proficient readers while they read single words. Three groups of control participants (for a total of 79) were tested. All were in the first, second or third grade of elementary school.