People spontaneously divide everyday experience into smaller units (event segmentation). To measure event segmentation, studies typically ask participants to explicitly mark the boundaries between events as they watch a movie (segmentation task). Their data may then be used to infer how others are likely to segment the same movie.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPreparation of attention facilitates speeded responding at time points with a high probability of target occurrence. Conversely, time points with low target probability are disadvantaged due to lower readiness. When targets are uniformly distributed in time, this effect results in higher readiness after longer preparation times (foreperiods).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTemporal expectations aid performance by allowing the optimization of attentional readiness at moment of highest target probability. Reward enhances cognitive performance through its action on preparatory and reactive attentional processes. To elucidate how motivation interacts with mechanisms of implicit temporal attention, we studied healthy young adult participants (N = 73) performing a sustained attention task with simultaneous pupillometric recording, under different reward conditions (baseline: 0 c; reward: 10 c/fast response).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStudy Objectives: To investigate the short- and longer-term impact of a 45-min delay in school start time on sleep and well-being of adolescents.
Methods: The sample consisted of 375 students in grades 7-10 (mean age ± SD: 14.6 ± 1.
Sleep deprivation (SD) consistently degrades performance in tasks requiring sustained attention, resulting in slower and more variable response times that worsen with time-on-task. Loss of motivation to exert effort may exacerbate performance degradation during SD. To test this, we evaluated sustained performance on a vigilance task, combining this with an effort-based decision-making task and pupillometry.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSleep is important for normative cognitive functioning. A single night of total sleep deprivation can reduce the capacity to encode new memories. However, it is unclear how sleep restriction during several consecutive nights affects memory encoding.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMaintaining sustained attention over time is an effortful process limited by finite cognitive resources. Recent theories describe the role of motivation in the allocation of such resources as a decision process: the costs of effortful performance are weighed against its gains. We examined this hypothesis by combining methods from attention research and decision neuroscience.
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