Grounding the Attentional Boost Effect in Events and the Efficient Brain.

Attention and memory for everyday experiences vary over time, wherein some moments are better attended and subsequently better remembered than others. These effects have been demonstrated in naturalistic viewing tasks with complex and relatively uncontrolled stimuli, as well as in more controlled laboratory tasks with simpler stimuli. For example, in the (ABE), participants perform two tasks at once: memorizing a series of briefly presented stimuli (e.

Auditory Target Detection Enhances Visual Processing and Hippocampal Functional Connectivity.

Though dividing one's attention between two input streams typically impairs performance, detecting a behaviorally relevant stimulus can sometimes enhance the encoding of unrelated information presented at the same time. Previous research has shown that selection of this kind boosts visual cortical activity and memory for concurrent items. An important unanswered question is whether such effects are reflected in processing quality and functional connectivity in visual regions and in the hippocampus.

Estimates of locus coeruleus function with functional magnetic resonance imaging are influenced by localization approaches and the use of multi-echo data.

The locus coeruleus (LC) plays a central role in regulating human cognition, arousal, and autonomic states. Efforts to characterize the LC's function in humans using functional magnetic resonance imaging have been hampered by its small size and location near a large source of noise, the fourth ventricle. We tested whether the ability to characterize LC function is improved by employing neuromelanin-T1 weighted images (nmT1) for LC localization and multi-echo functional magnetic resonance imaging (ME-fMRI) for estimating intrinsic functional connectivity (iFC).

Attending to behaviorally relevant moments enhances incidental relational memory.

Memory for the items one has recently encountered is sometimes enhanced in divided attention tasks: Attending to behaviorally relevant items, such as a target in a detection task, boosts memory for unrelated background items (e.g., scenes or words).