No electrophysiological evidence for semantic processing during inattentional blindness.

A long-standing question concerns whether sensory input can reach semantic stages of processing in the absence of attention and awareness. Here, we examine whether the N400, an event related potential associated with semantic processing, can occur under conditions of inattentional blindness. By employing a novel three-phase inattentional blindness paradigm designed to maximise the opportunity for detecting an N400, we found no evidence for it when participants were inattentionally blind to the eliciting stimuli (related and unrelated word pairs).

Supervising the self-driving car: Situation awareness and fatigue during highly automated driving.

Vehicle automation promises to reduce the demands of the driving task, making driving less fatiguing, more convenient, and safer. Nevertheless, Level 3 automated vehicles rely on a human driver to be ready to resume control, requiring the driver to reconstruct situation awareness (SA) and resume the driving task. Understanding the interaction between non-driving-related task (NDRT) use, SA, and takeover capacity is important because an effective takeover is entirely dependent on, and scaffolds from, effectively reconstructed SA.

Can degrading information about patient symptoms in vignettes alter clinical reasoning in paramedics and paramedic students? An experimental application of fuzzy trace theory.

Background: Research has shown paramedics form rapid intuitive impressions on first, meeting a patient and these impressions subsequently affected their clinical reasoning. We report an experiment where theory-based interventions are developed with the goal of reducing reliance on intuitive reasoning by paramedics and paramedic students in simulated patients.

Method: Australian paramedics (n = 213; 49% female) and paramedicine students (n = 83; 55% female) attending paramedic conferences completed a 2 × 2 fully between participants experiment.

Fluency and confidence predict paramedic diagnostic intuition: An experimental study of applied dual-process theory.

Introduction: We report an experiment using Australian paramedics (n = 64) and Australian paramedicine undergraduates (n = 44), on the processes underlying the formation of an intuitive diagnostic impression, based on limited dispatch information. Previous research has signalled roles for objective likelihood of the disease, subjective typicality of the disease, and the ease with which the diagnosis comes to mind (answer fluency) as important in impression formation.

Method: Participants completed four brief written clinical vignettes under time pressure and with a concurrent navigation task to simulate conditions faced by paramedics prior to meeting a patient.

Identifying objective behavioural measures of expert driver situation awareness.

Efforts to reduce road crash rates depend on a clear understanding of the factors that contribute to driver risk. Not all drivers are at equivalent risk. It is critical to identify the factors that contribute to the development of expertise in the driving environment.

Identifying Interactive Factors That May Increase Crash Risk between Young Drivers and Trucks: A Narrative Review.

Sharing the road with trucks is associated with increased risk of serious injury and death for passenger vehicle drivers. However, the onus for minimising risk lies not just with truck drivers; other drivers must understand the unique performance limitations of trucks associated with stopping distances, blind spots, and turning manoeuverability, so they can suitably act and react around trucks. Given the paucity of research aimed at understanding the specific crash risk vulnerability of young drivers around trucks, the authors employ a narrative review methodology that brings together evidence from both truck and young driver road safety research domains, as well as data regarding known crash risks for each driving cohort, to gain a comprehensive understanding of what young drivers are likely to know about heavy vehicle performance limitations, where there may be gaps in their understanding, and how this could potentially increase crash risk.

Keeping Safe on Australian Roads: Overview of Key Determinants of Risky Driving, Passenger Injury, and Fatalities for Indigenous Populations.

Social and cultural barriers associated with inequitable access to driver licensing and associated road safety education, as well as socioeconomic issues that preclude ongoing vehicle maintenance and registration, result in unsafe in-car behaviours such as passenger overcrowding. This in turn is associated with improper seatbelt usage, noncompliance with child restraint mandates, and driver distraction. For example, in Australia, where seatbelt use is mandatory, Indigenous road users are three times less likely to wear seatbelts than non-Indigenous road users.

Pre-stimulus alpha predicts inattentional blindness.

Pre- and post-stimulus oscillatory activity between 8 and 12 hertz, referred to as the alpha-band, correlates with conscious visual awareness of stimuli across a variety of psychophysical tasks. Within an EEG-adapted inattentional blindness task, the current study sought to examine whether this relationship holds for conscious awareness of stimuli under conditions of inattentional blindness. Noticing rates of the task-irrelevant unexpected stimulus were correlated with a significant decrease in alpha power over bilateral parietal-occipital areas during the pre-stimulus interval, and a significant decrease in alpha power over parietal-occipital regions in the right hemisphere during the post-stimulus interval.

A Temporal Sampling Basis for Visual Processing in Developmental Dyslexia.

Knowledge of oscillatory entrainment and its fundamental role in cognitive and behavioral processing has increasingly been applied to research in the field of reading and developmental dyslexia. Growing evidence indicates that oscillatory entrainment to theta frequency spoken language in the auditory domain, along with cross-frequency theta-gamma coupling, support phonological processing (i.e.

tACS Stimulation at Alpha Frequency Selectively Induces Inattentional Blindness.

Contemporary neurocognitive models implicate alpha oscillations as a top-down mechanism of cortical inhibition, instrumental in the suppression of information that fails to reach conscious visual awareness. This suggests that alpha-band activity may play a key role in the phenomenon of inattentional blindness, however this has not yet been empirically examined. The current study employed transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) over occipital cortex at alpha, theta, and sham frequencies within an inattentional blindness task to delineate whether an exogenous manipulation of alpha oscillations has a modulatory effect on visual awareness of the unexpected stimulus.

It is the egg, not the chicken; dorsal visual deficits present in dyslexia are not present in illiterate adults.

Some individuals with dyslexia demonstrate deficits in reading, visual attention, and visual processing which can be attributed to a functional failure of the magnocells in the visual system or in the dorsal visual pathway. The study examines the role of magno/dorsal function in dyslexic adults compared with normal, illiterate, and semi-literate readers. Coherent motion and coherent form were used in Experiment 1, and the frequency doubling illusion and static-gratings were used in Experiment 2.

Tablet computer games to measure dorsal stream performance in good and poor readers.

Evidence suggests a link between deficits in visuo-spatial attention, and subsequent reading ability. However, all the research in the area thus far has been conducted using traditional, lab-based psychophysics, with very tightly controlled visual parameters. In order to take this research further, such as using visuo-spatial tasks for remediation purposes, it must be established that such tasks can be taken out of the laboratory, 'gamified', and still predict reading ability.

Allocating Attention to Detect Motorcycles: The Role of Inattentional Blindness.

Objective: To determine whether inattentional blindness (IB) can be used to understand the psychological mechanisms around looked-but-failed-to-see (LBFTS) crashes involving motorcycles Background: IB occurs when an observer looks directly at an object yet fails to see it, thus LBFTS crashes may be a real-world example of IB. The study tests a perceptual cycle model in which motorcycles are detected less frequently because they fall lower on the attentional hierarchy for driving.

Method: A driving-related IB task with photographs of driving situations investigated whether an additional stimulus, a taxi or motorcycle, would be more likely to be missed by participants.

The Impact of Concurrent Noise on Visual Search in Children With ADHD.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of a concurrent "white noise" stimulus on selective attention in children with ADHD.

Method: Participants were 33 children aged 7 to 14 years, who had been previously diagnosed with ADHD. All children completed a computer-based conjunction search task under two noise conditions: a classroom noise condition and a classroom noise + white noise condition.

Brain mechanisms and reading remediation: more questions than answers.

Dyslexia is generally diagnosed in childhood and is characterised by poor literacy skills with associated phonological and perceptual problems. Compensated dyslexic readers are adult readers who have a documented history of childhood dyslexia but as adults can read and comprehend written text well. Uncompensated dyslexic readers are adults who similarly have a documented history of reading impairment but remain functionally reading-impaired all their lives.

Process-oriented guided-inquiry learning improves long-term retention of information.

Many chemistry educators have adopted the process-oriented guided instructional learning (POGIL) pedagogy. However, it is not clear which aspects of POGIL are the most important in terms of actual learning. We compared 354 first-year undergraduate psychology students' learning in physiological psychology using four teaching methods: control, POGIL, POGIL without reporting [no report out (NRO)], and POGIL run by untrained graduate students [new facilitator (NF)].

Impulsivity and related neuropsychological features in regular and addictive first person shooter gaming.

Putative cyber addictions are of significant interest. There remains little experimental research into excessive use of first person shooter (FPS) games, despite their global popularity. Moreover, the role between excessive gaming and impulsivity remains unclear, with previous research showing conflicting findings.

Physiological arousal deficits in addicted gamers differ based on preferred game genre.

Background/aims: There has been significant discussion surrounding the psychopathology of excessive gaming and whether it constitutes an addiction. The current study investigated physiological and subjective levels of arousal in gamers of two genres and the relationship between sensation seeking and gaming addiction.

Methods: Heart rate (HR), blood pressure (BP) and skin conductance were recorded at baseline, during gaming for 15 min and after gaming in 30 massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) and 30 first-person shooter (FPS) male gamers.

Temporal sampling in vision and the implications for dyslexia.

It has recently been suggested that dyslexia may manifest as a deficit in the neural synchrony underlying language-based codes (Goswami, 2011), such that the phonological deficits apparent in dyslexia occur as a consequence of poor synchronisation of oscillatory brain signals to the sounds of language. There is compelling evidence to support this suggestion, and it provides an intriguing new development in understanding the aetiology of dyslexia. It is undeniable that dyslexia is associated with poor phonological coding, however, reading is also a visual task, and dyslexia has also been associated with poor visual coding, particularly visuo-spatial sensitivity.

Attentional differences in driving judgments for country and city scenes: Semantic congruency in inattentional blindness.

'Looked-but-failed-to-see' vehicle collisions occur when a driver gives all indications of having responsibly evaluated the driving situation yet still fails to see a hazard that is clearly in view. The experience maps well onto the psychological phenomenon called inattentional blindness (IB). IB occurs when a viewer fails to see an unexpected object that is clearly visible, particularly if they are concentrating on an additional primary task.

Minds on the blink: the relationship between inattentional blindness and attentional blink.

Failures of conscious visual awareness occur when specific task demands prevent an observer from detecting a stimulus that would otherwise be clearly visible. Two examples are inattentional blindness (IB) and attentional blink (AB). IB is the failure to detect an unexpected stimulus when attention is otherwise engaged.

Attending to music decreases inattentional blindness.

This article investigates how auditory attention affects inattentional blindness (IB), a failure of conscious awareness in which an observer does not notice an unexpected event because their attention is engaged elsewhere. Previous research using the attentional blink paradigm has indicated that listening to music can reduce failures of conscious awareness. It was proposed that listening to music would decrease IB by reducing observers' frequency of task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs).

Spelling and reading: using visual sensitivity to explore shared or separate orthographic representations.

Do we use the same neurocognitive mechanisms to spell that we do to read? There is a considerable number of conflicting findings, such that evidence has been provided to support common mechanisms for reading and spelling, while other research supports the proposal that reading and spelling utilise unique neurocognitive resources. Sensitivity to visual spatial-frequency doubling (FD) has been demonstrated to correlate with and specifically predict orthographic processing when reading; therefore, if spelling and reading share some elements of orthographic representation, sensitivity to FD should similarly correlate with, and predict, spelling ability by virtue of this shared association. A double dissociation between reading and spelling was found such that sensitivity to the FD task, as mediated by the visual dorsal stream, predicted reading ability but not spelling, while the visual control task predicted spelling but not reading ability, in poor readers/spellers.

Looking without seeing or seeing without looking? Eye movements in sustained inattentional blindness.

Inattentional blindness (IB) describes the failure to notice salient but unexpected stimuli when attention is partially engaged by another task. Few studies have explicitly investigated the role of eye movements in IB and the relative contributions of overt and covert attention. We recorded eye movements in a series of IB experiments using dynamic stimuli.

Dyslexia: a deficit in visuo-spatial attention, not in phonological processing.

Developmental dyslexia affects up to 10 per cent of the population and it is important to understand its causes. It is widely assumed that phonological deficits, that is, deficits in how words are sounded out, cause the reading difficulties in dyslexia. However, there is emerging evidence that phonological problems and the reading impairment both arise from poor visual (i.