Probing sustained attention and fatigue across the lifespan.

Trait fatigues reflects tiredness that persists throughout a prolonged period, whereas state fatigue is a short-term reaction to intense or prolonged effort. We investigated the impact of sustained attention (using the SART) on both trait and state fatigue levels in the general population. An online version of the SART was undertaken by 115 participants, stratified across the whole adult lifespan.

Developmental changes in individual alpha frequency: Recording EEG data during public engagement events.

Statistical power in cognitive neuroimaging experiments is often very low. Low sample size can reduce the likelihood of detecting real effects (false negatives) and increase the risk of detecting non-existing effects by chance (false positives). Here, we document our experience of leveraging a relatively unexplored method of collecting a large sample size for simple electroencephalography (EEG) studies: by recording EEG in the community during public engagement and outreach events.

A meta-analysis of the line bisection task in children.

Meta-analyses have shown subtle, group-level asymmetries of spatial attention in adults favouring the left hemispace (pseudoneglect). However, no meta-analysis has synthesized data on children. We performed a random-effects meta-analysis of spatial biases in children aged ≤16 years.

A Meta-Analysis of Line Bisection and Landmark Task Performance in Older Adults.

Young adults exhibit a small asymmetry of visuospatial attention that favours the left side of space relative to the right (pseudoneglect). However, it remains unclear whether this leftward bias is maintained, eliminated or shifted rightward in older age. Here we present two meta-analyses that aimed to identify whether adults aged ≥50 years old display a group-level spatial attention bias, as indexed by the line bisection and the landmark tasks.

Editorial for special issue on neglect rehabilitation.

It is clear already that in current and future years more people will suffer from stroke, whether related to COVID-19 or not, and given its prevalence, many more people's lives will be affected by neglect. Here we hope to have contributed to its possible amelioration with highlights of the latest thinking on neglect diagnosis, prevalence and treatment.

Mobile EEG reveals functionally dissociable dynamic processes supporting real-world ambulatory obstacle avoidance: Evidence for early proactive control.

The ability to safely negotiate the world on foot takes humans years to develop, reflecting the extensive cognitive demands associated with real-time planning and control of walking. Despite the importance of walking, methodological limitations mean that surprisingly little is known about the neural and cognitive processes that support ambulatory motor control. Here, we report mobile EEG data recorded from 32 healthy young adults during real-world ambulatory obstacle avoidance.

Is the "end-of-study guess" a valid measure of sham blinding during transcranial direct current stimulation?

Studies using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) typically incorporate a fade-in, short-stimulation, fade-out sham (placebo) protocol, which is assumed to be indistinct from a 10-30 min active protocol on the scalp. However, many studies report that participants can dissociate active stimulation from sham, even during low-intensity 1 mA currents. We recently identified differences in the perception of an active (10 min of 1 mA) and a sham (20 s of 1 mA) protocol that lasted for 5 min after the cessation of sham.

Non-invasive brain stimulation in Stroke patients (NIBS): A prospective randomized open blinded end-point (PROBE) feasibility trial using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in post-stroke hemispatial neglect.

Up to 80% of people who experience a right-hemisphere stroke suffer from hemispatial neglect. This syndrome is debilitating and impedes rehabilitation. We carried out a clinical feasibility trial of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and a behavioural rehabilitation programme, alone or in combination, in patients with neglect.

Intra- and inter-task reliability of spatial attention measures in healthy older adults.

At present, there is a lack of systematic investigation into intra- and inter-task consistency effects in older adults, when investigating lateralised spatial attention. In young adults, spatial attention typically manifests itself in a processing advantage for the left side of space ("pseudoneglect"), whereas older adults have been reported to display no strongly lateralised bias, or a preference towards the right side. Building on our earlier study in young adults, we investigated older adults, aged between 60 to 86 years, on five commonly used spatial attention tasks (line bisection, landmark, grey and grating scales and lateralised visual detection).

The time course of ineffective sham-blinding during low-intensity (1 mA) transcranial direct current stimulation.

Studies using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) typically compare an active protocol relative to a shorter sham (placebo) protocol. Both protocols are presumed to be perceptually identical on the scalp, and thus represent an effective method of delivering double-blinded experimental designs. However, participants often show above-chance accuracy when asked which condition involved active/sham retrospectively.

Correction: Intra- and Inter-Task Reliability of Spatial Attention Measures in Pseudoneglect.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.

Right-lateralised lane keeping in young and older British drivers.

Young adults demonstrate a small, but consistent, asymmetry of spatial attention favouring the left side of space ("pseudoneglect") in laboratory-based tests of perception. Conversely, in more naturalistic environments, behavioural errors towards the right side of space are often observed. In the older population, spatial attention asymmetries are generally diminished, or even reversed to favour the right side of space, but much of this evidence has been gained from lab-based and/or psychophysical testing.

No Interaction between tDCS Current Strength and Baseline Performance: A Conceptual Replication.

Several recent studies have reported non-linear effects of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), which has been attributed to an interaction between the stimulation parameters (e.g., current strength, duration) and the neural state of the cortex being stimulated (e.

Age-related reduction of hemispheric lateralisation for spatial attention: An EEG study.

A group-level visuospatial attention bias towards the left side of space (pseudoneglect) is consistently observed in young adults, which is likely to be a consequence of right parieto-occipital dominance for spatial attention. Conversely, healthy older adults demonstrate a rightward shift of this behavioural bias, hinting that an age-related reduction of lateralised neural activity may occur within visuospatial attention networks. We compared young (aged 18-25) and older (aged 60-80) adults on a computerised line bisection (landmark) task whilst recording event-related potentials (ERPs).

Efficacy of home-based visuomotor feedback training in stroke patients with chronic hemispatial neglect.

Hemispatial neglect is a severe cognitive condition frequently observed after a stroke, associated with unawareness of one side of space, disability and poor long-term outcome. Visuomotor feedback training (VFT) is a neglect rehabilitation technique that involves a simple, inexpensive and feasible training of grasping-to-lift rods at the centre. We compared the immediate and long-term effects of VFT vs.

Intra- and Inter-Task Reliability of Spatial Attention Measures in Pseudoneglect.

Healthy young adults display a leftward asymmetry of spatial attention ("pseudoneglect") that has been measured with a wide range of different tasks. Yet at present there is a lack of systematic evidence that the tasks commonly used in research today are i) stable measures over time and ii) provide similar measures of spatial bias. Fifty right-handed young adults were tested on five tasks (manual line bisection, landmark, greyscales, gratingscales and lateralised visual detection) on two different days.

Non-linear effects of transcranial direct current stimulation as a function of individual baseline performance: Evidence from biparietal tDCS influence on lateralized attention bias.

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a well-established technique for non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS). However, the technique suffers from a high variability in outcome, some of which is likely explained by the state of the brain at tDCS-delivery but for which explanatory, mechanistic models are lacking. Here, we tested the effects of bi-parietal tDCS on perceptual line bisection as a function of tDCS current strength (1 mA vs 2 mA) and individual baseline discrimination sensitivity (a measure associated with intrinsic uncertainty/signal-to-noise balance).

The implications of state-dependent tDCS effects in aging: Behavioural response is determined by baseline performance.

Young adults typically display a processing advantage towards the left side of space ("pseudoneglect"), possibly as a result of right parietal dominance for spatial attention. This bias is ameliorated with age, with older adults displaying either no strongly lateralised bias, or a slight bias towards the right. This may represent an age-related reduction of right hemispheric dominance and/or increased left hemispheric involvement.

Spatial attention: differential shifts in pseudoneglect direction with time-on-task and initial bias support the idea of observer subtypes.

Asymmetry in human spatial attention has long been documented. In the general population the majority of individuals tend to misbisect horizontal lines to the left of veridical centre. Nonetheless in virtually all previously reported studies on healthy participants, there have been subsets of people displaying rightward biases.

No neglect-specific deficits in reaching tasks.

It is well established that patients with hemispatial neglect present with severe visuospatial impairments, but studies that have directly investigated visuomotor control have revealed diverging results, with some studies showing that neglect patients perform relatively better on such tasks. The present study compared the visuomotor performance of patients with and without neglect after right-hemisphere stroke with those of age-matched controls. Participants were asked to point either directly towards targets or halfway between two stimuli, both with and without visual feedback during movement.