Cholinergic modulation of stimulus-driven attentional capture.

Distraction is one of the main problems encountered by people with degenerative diseases that are associated with reduced cortical cholinergic innervations. We examined the effects of donepezil, a cholinesterase inhibitor, on stimulus-driven attentional capture. Reflexive attention shifts to a distractor are usually elicited by abrupt peripheral changes.

Specific attention disorders in drivers with traumatic brain injury.

Objective: To highlight the impact of the increasing attentional load on performance of both normal drivers and drivers with traumatic brain injury.

Background: Patients with brain injury have a higher accident risk than people with no brain injury [1], probably as a result of persistent attention disorders.

Method: Ten patients and 10 paired controls took part in a computerized selective attention task involving specific attentional processes.

Diazepam impairs temporal dynamics of visual attention.

The effect of benzodiazepines on attention has been the object of few investigations. Studies using the spatial cueing paradigm (Posner's paradigm) have reported inconsistent results, which are likely due to methodological and/or dose differences but suggest impaired disengagement of attention from the cue to the target. The authors investigated the effect of a benzodiazepine (diazepam) on attentional shifting in the temporal domain.

Lorazepam induces multiple disturbances in selective attention: attentional overload, decrement in target processing efficiency, and shifts in perceptual discrimination and response bias.

There is a general consensus that benzodiazepines affect attentional processes, yet only few studies have tried to investigate these impairments in detail. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of a single dose of Lorazepam on performance in a target cancellation task with important time constraints. We measured correct target detections and correct distractor rejections, misses and false positives.

Ambient odors influence the amplitude and time course of visual distraction.

Behavioral performance was examined in a task of attentional capture by luminance under conditions of ambient odors (phenyl ethyl alcohol [PEA], olfactory stimulus, and allyl isothiocyanate [AIC], mixed olfactory/trigeminal stimulus). The AIC increased the amplitude and duration of capture, whereas the presence of PEA led capture to disappear. Furthermore, the PEA caused a general slowing in the speed of information processing.

The human pulvinar and attentional processing of visual distractors.

The processing of a target is degraded when noise is present in proximity, and performance increases as the target-noise distance increases. We tested a group of healthy volunteers and a group of patients, who suffered strokes in the posterior thalamus, in a task where the target-noise distance was manipulated. Whilst controls exhibited the expected pattern of results, thalamic patients exhibited little signs of noise interference.

Ambient odors modulate visual attentional capture.

Sudden visual events capture attention involuntarily because they may signal potential threats. Some theoretical accounts consider that the biological significance of these events is established through the limbic structures. Thus, the manipulation of the limbic activity would affect attentional capture.