Violent Video Game Play and (De)Sensitization to Threat.

This study assesses whether the frequency of violent video game play is associated with attentional desensitization or sensitization to images depicting violence or nonviolent interpersonal conflict. Two hundred and thirty-two participants reported their three most frequently played video games and the amount of time each game was played in a typical week. Next, they completed an assessment of emotion-induced blindness, which refers to a reduction in the correct identification of a neutral target image when it follows an emotionally charged distractor image.

From classic to current: a look back on attention research in the American Journal of Psychology.

This review examines attention research appearing in The American Journal of Psychology over the journal's rich 125-year history. In particular, the review examines studies focused on selective attention's role in modulating the influence of distraction and the methods used to capture the nature of selective attention. Special attention is given to classic articles by Treisman (1964a, 1964b), Neisser (1963), and Eriksen and Rohrbaugh (1970), whose methods and results are examined in detail in light of current theory and research in selective attention.

Spatial interference between attended items engenders serial visual processing.

A pair of experiments investigated the architecture of visual processing, parallel versus serial, across high and low levels of spatial interference in a divided attention task. Subjects made speeded judgments that required them to attend to a pair of color-cued objects among gray filler items, with the spatial proximity between the attended items varied to manipulate the strength of interference between attended items. Systems factorial analysis (Townsend & Nozawa, Journal of Mathematical Psychology 39:321-359, 1995) was used to identify processing architecture.

Age, clutter, and competitive selection.

Modern theory explains visual selective attention as a competition for receptive fields in the extrastriate cortex. The present study examined whether this competition contributes to older adults' difficulty in processing visual clutter. In 2 experiments, young and older adult subjects made same-different judgments of target shapes in displays with or without clutter.

Dynamics of target and distractor processing in visual search: evidence from event-related brain potentials.

When multiple objects are present in a visual scene, salient and behaviorally relevant objects are attentionally selected and receive enhanced processing at the expense of less salient or less relevant objects. Here we examined three lateralized components of the event-related potential (ERP) - the N2pc, Ptc, and SPCN - as indices of target and distractor processing in a visual search paradigm. Participants responded to the orientation of a target while ignoring an attentionally salient distractor and ERPs elicited by the target and the distractor were obtained.

Event-related potentials dissociate effects of salience and space in biased competition for visual representation.

Background: Selective visual attention is the process by which the visual system enhances behaviorally relevant stimuli and filters out others. Visual attention is thought to operate through a cortical mechanism known as biased competition. Representations of stimuli within cortical visual areas compete such that they mutually suppress each others' neural response.

Competitive interaction degrades target selection: an ERP study.

Localized attentional interference (LAI) occurs when attending to a visual object degrades processing of nearby objects. Competitive interaction accounts of LAI explain the phenomenon as the result of competition among objects for representation in extrastriate cortex. Here, we examined the N2pc component of the event-related potential (ERP) as a likely neural correlate of LAI.

Localized attentional interference reflects competition for reentrant processing.

Visual performance is compromised when attention is divided between objects that are near one another in the visual field. It has been postulated that this effect, termed localized attentional interference (LAI), reflects competition between visual-object representations for the control of cortical neural responses. To determine whether LAI arises during feedforward processing or during reentrant processing, the present study examined the influence of poststimulus pattern and four-dot masks on the strength of the effect.

On the relationship between flanker interference and localized attentional interference.

The flanker interference (FI) effect suggests that visual attention operates like a mental spotlight, enhancing all stimuli within a selected region. In contrast, other data suggest difficulty dividing attention between objects near one another in the visual field, an effect termed localized attentional interference (LAI). The present experiment examined the relationship between these phenomena.

Violent video game play impacts facial emotion recognition.

This study assessed the speed of recognition of facial emotional expressions (happy and angry) as a function of violent video game play. Color photos of calm facial expressions morphed to either an angry or a happy facial expression. Participants were asked to make a speeded identification of the emotion (happiness or anger) during the morph.

Attentional templates regulate competitive interactions among attended visual objects.

In two experiments, we examined the mechanisms responsible for creating a zone of interference surrounding an attended visual object (see, e.g., Mounts & Gavett, 2004).

Localized attentional interference affects object individuation, not feature detection.

Modern theorists conceptualize visual selective attention as a competition between object representations for the control of extrastriate receptive fields, an account supported by the finding that attentional selection of one stimulus can degrade processing of nearby stimuli. In the present study the conditions that produce reciprocal interference between attended stimuli are examined. Each display contained either no, one, or two feature-defined target items among an array of homogeneous distractors.

Spatially mediated capacity limits in attentive visual perception.

Modern theories conceptualize visual selective attention as a competition between objects for the control of cortical receptive fields (RFs). Implicit in this framework is the suggestion that spatially proximal objects, which draw from overlapping pools of RFs, should be more difficult to represent in parallel and with excess capacity than spatially separated objects. The present experiments tested this prediction using analysis of response time distributions in a redundant-targets letter identification task.

Violent media consumption and the recognition of dynamic facial expressions.

This study assessed the speed of recognition of facial emotional expressions (happy and angry) as a function of violent media consumption. Color photos of calm facial expressions morphed to either an angry or a happy facial expression. Participants were asked to make a speeded identification of the emotion (happiness or anger) during the morph.

Attentional selection: A salience-based competition for representation.

The role of salience in localized attentional interference (LAI) was examined. In two experiments, target discrimination performance was measured as a function of the spatial separation between the target and a salient distractor item. In Experiment 1, both the salience of the distractor and that of a target were manipulated.

Competition for representation is mediated by relative attentional salience.

The biased competition model of attentional selection proposes that objects compete with one another for neural representation, with the competition rooted in stimulus and attentionally-based salience. Two experiments explore how the salience of a target item relative to flanking items impacts the speed of target identification. The results of two experiments suggest that spatially proximal items compete for shared, spatially dependent processing resources.

The role of salience in localized attentional interference.

Observers were cued to attend to two discs from an array and made a discrimination of a target presented within one of the discs. In Experiments 1 and 2, the relative attentional salience of the two attended items was manipulated via the cues (size changes in Experiment 1; size and color changes in Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, the relative salience was manipulated via the luminance contrast of the items themselves.

Age-related differences in localized attentional interference.

Attentional selection of an object in the visual field degrades processing of neighboring stimuli in young adults. A pair of experiments examined the effects of aging on such localized attentional interference. In Experiment 1, younger and older observers made speeded same-different judgments of target shapes that varied in spatial separation.