Impact of active and latent concerns about COVID-19 on attention.

The interactions between emotion and attention are complex due to the multifaceted nature of attention. Adding to this complexity, the COVID-19 pandemic has altered the emotional landscape, broadly heightening health and financial concerns. Can the heightened concerns about COVID-19 impair one or more of the components of attention? To explore the connection between heightened concerns about COVID-19 and attention, in a preregistered study, we collected survey responses from 234 participants assessing levels of concerns surrounding COVID-19, followed by four psychophysics tasks hypothesized to tap into different aspects of attention: visual search, working memory, sustained attention, and cognitive control.

Perceptual and response factors in the gradual onset continuous performance tasks.

Using a novel gradual onset continuous performance task (gradCPT), recent research has uncovered a brain network of the sustained attention ability, demonstrating marked individual differences. Yet much about the cognitive processes that support performance on the gradCPT remains unknown. Here, we tested the importance of response inhibition and perceptual discrimination in the gradCPT.

Do concerns about COVID-19 impair sustained attention?

The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has considerably heightened health and financial concerns for many individuals. Similar concerns, such as those associated with poverty, impair performance on cognitive control tasks. If ongoing concerns about COVID-19 substantially increase the tendency to mind wander in tasks requiring sustained attention, these worries could degrade performance on a wide range of tasks, leading, for example, to increased traffic accidents, diminished educational achievement, and lower workplace productivity.

Memory across a short-delay: Systematic biases in memory for faces.

From geometric figures to human faces, many visual stimuli vary along a continuum in featural space, anchored at one end by a highly distinctive constellation of features, at the other by a neutral set. Here we used a continuum of morphed faces to test whether errors in visual short-term memory are symmetric in feature space around the target or systematically biased toward one or the other end of the continuum. Participants were shown a face for 1 s.

Characteristics of sustaining attention in a gradual-onset continuous performance task.

Continuous performance tasks are frequently associated with a vigilance decrement, particularly when target events are rare and after prolonged time on task. Here we characterized the time course of a performance decrement that happens more rapidly. Using the gradual-onset continuous performance task (the gradCPT), we presented participants with a long sequence of scenes that gradually faded in and out.

Visual statistical learning at basic and subordinate category levels in real-world images.

Visual statistical learning (VSL) has been proposed as a powerful mechanism underlying the striking ability of human observers to handle complex visual environments. Previous studies have shown that VSL can occur when statistical information is embedded at multiple levels of abstraction, such as at semantically different category levels. In the present study, we further examined whether statistical regularities at a basic category level (e.

Visual statistical learning of temporal structures at different hierarchical levels.

Visual environments are complex. In order to process the complex information provided by visual environments, the visual system adopts strategies to reduce its complexity. One strategy, called visual statistical learning, or VSL, is to extract the statistical regularities from the environment.