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.

Sequence learning is surprisingly fragile in visual search.

Extensive research has shown that people are sensitive to statistical regularities of visual stimuli, such as a repeated sequence of object locations. Such learning, however, has primarily occurred for objects presented in isolation. Here, we tested whether sequence learning also manifested in complex displays.

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.

Progress Toward Resolving the Attentional Capture Debate.

For over 25 years, researchers have debated whether physically salient stimuli capture attention in an automatic manner, independent of the observer's goals, or whether the capture of attention depends on the match between a stimulus and the observer's task set. Recent evidence suggests an intermediate position in which salient stimuli automatically produce a priority signal, but the capture of attention can be prevented via an inhibitory mechanism that suppresses the salient stimulus. Here, proponents from multiple sides of the debate describe how their original views have changed in light of recent research, as well as remaining areas of disagreement.

The Role of Frontoparietal Cortex across the Functional Stages of Visual Search.

Areas in frontoparietal cortex have been shown to be active in a range of cognitive tasks and have been proposed to play a key role in goal-driven activities (Dosenbach, N. U. F.

Late guidance resolves the search slope paradox in contextual cueing.

Visual search is facilitated by statistical learning of repeated search contexts, termed 'contextual cueing'. Repeated displays are thought to enhance attentional guidance, but this has been challenged by the absence of search-slope differences between repeated and novel displays. Here we use eye-tracking to resolve this paradox by calculating a measure of when during search the contextual cueing benefit emerges.

Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence for a dissociation between working memory capacity and feature-based attention.

When attending to visual objects with particular features, neural processing is typically biased toward those features. Previous work has suggested that maintaining such feature-based attentional sets may involve the same neural resources as visual working memory. If so, the extent to which feature-based attention influences stimulus processing should be related to individuals' working memory capacity.

Perceptual learning in the identification of lung cancer in chest radiographs.

Extensive research has shown that practice yields highly specific perceptual learning of simple visual properties such as orientation and contrast. Does this same learning characterize more complex perceptual skills? Here we investigated perceptual learning of complex medical images. Novices underwent training over four sessions to discriminate which of two chest radiographs contained a tumor and to indicate the location of the tumor.

Redundancy gain in visual search of simulated X-ray images.

Cancer diagnosis frequently relies on the interpretation of medical images such as chest X-rays and mammography. This process is error prone; misdiagnoses can reach a rate of 15% or higher. Of particular interest are false negatives-tumors that are present but missed.

Mechanisms of contextual cueing: A tutorial review.

Repeated contexts yield faster response time in visual search, compared with novel contexts. This effect is known as contextual cueing. Despite extensive study over the past two decades, there remains a spirited debate over whether repeated displays expedite search before the target is found (early locus) or facilitate response after the target is found (late locus).

A spatial bias toward highly rewarded locations is associated with awareness.

Mounting evidence suggests that monetary reward induces an incidentally learned selection bias toward highly rewarded features. It remains controversial, however, whether learning of reward regularities has similar effects on spatial attention. Here we ask whether spatial biases toward highly rewarded locations are learned implicitly, or are instead associated with explicit knowledge of reward structure.

Implicit location probability learning does not induce baseline shifts of visuospatial attention.

We tested whether implicit learning causes shifts of spatial attention in advance of or in response to stimulus onset. Participants completed randomly interspersed trials of letter search, which involved reporting the orientation of a T among Ls, and scene search, which involved identifying which of four scenes was from a target category (e.g.

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.

Taking a closer look at visual search: Just how feature-agnostic is singleton detection mode?

Singleton detection mode is a state in which spatial attention is set to prioritize any objects that differ from all other objects present on any feature dimension. Relatively little research has been devoted to confirming the consequences such a search mode has for stimulus processing. It is often implied that when observers employ singleton detection mode, all singletons capture attention equally, and when observers search for a single feature, only that feature captures attention.

Statistical learning of anomalous regions in complex faux X-ray images does not transfer between detection and discrimination.

The visual environment contains predictable information - "statistical regularities" - that can be used to aid perception and attentional allocation. Here we investigate the role of statistical learning in facilitating search tasks that resemble medical-image perception. Using faux X-ray images, we employed two tasks that mimicked two problems in medical-image perception: detecting a target signal that is poorly segmented from the background; and discriminating a candidate anomaly from benign signals.

Racing to remember: A theory of decision control in event-based prospective memory.

Event-based prospective memory (PM) requires remembering to perform intended deferred actions when particular stimuli or events are encountered in the future. We propose a detailed process theory within Braver's (2012) proactive and reactive framework of the way control is maintained over the competing demands of prospective memory decisions and decisions associated with ongoing task activities. The theory is instantiated in a quantitative "Prospective Memory Decision Control" (PMDC) architecture, which uses linear ballistic evidence accumulation (Brown & Heathcote, 2008) to model both PM and ongoing decision processes.

The curious case of spillover: Does it tell us much about saccade timing in reading?

In completing daily activities, the eyes make a series of saccades by gazing at stimuli in succession. The duration of gaze on each stimulus has been used to infer how the initiation of a saccade is timed relative to the underlying mental processing. In reading, gaze dwells longer on a word that occurs infrequently in English text (low frequency) than on a more frequent word (high frequency), but also on the following word, which is referred to as spillover.

The Risks of Downplaying Top-Down Control.

Is top-down control necessarily scarce, slow, and hence unimportant in visual selection? Here we outline the risks of downplaying top-down control. Contrary to Theeuwes' review, we suggest that not all sources of attention map onto a unitary attentional priority map. Goals and search habits may influence where and how people deploy attention, respectively.

Explicit goal-driven attention, unlike implicitly learned attention, spreads to secondary tasks.

To what degree does spatial attention for one task spread to all stimuli in the attended region, regardless of task relevance? Most models imply that spatial attention acts through a unitary priority map in a task-general manner. We show that implicit learning, unlike endogenous spatial cuing, can bias spatial attention within one task without biasing attention to a spatially overlapping secondary task. Participants completed a visual search task superimposed on a background containing scenes, which they were told to encode for a later memory task.

Acquisition of habitual visual attention and transfer to related tasks.

Extensive research has shown that statistical learning affects perception, attention, and action control; however, few studies have directly linked statistical learning with the formation of habits. Evidence that learning can induce a search habit has come from location probability learning, in which people prioritize locations frequently attended to in the past. Here, using an alternating training-testing procedure, we demonstrated that the initial attentional bias arises from short-term intertrial priming, whereas probability learning takes longer to emerge, first reaching significance in covert orienting (measured by reaction times) after about 48 training trials, and in overt orienting (measured by eye movements) after about 96 training trials.

Short-term and long-term attentional biases to frequently encountered target features.

It has long been known that frequently occurring targets are attended better than infrequent ones in visual search. But does this frequency-based attentional prioritization reflect momentary or durable changes in attention? Here we observed both short-term and long-term attentional biases for visual features as a function of different types of statistical associations between the targets, distractors, and features. Participants searched for a target, a line oriented horizontally or vertically among diagonal distractors, and reported its length.

Accumulating evidence about what prospective memory costs actually reveal.

Event-based prospective memory (PM) tasks require participants to substitute an atypical PM response for an ongoing task response when presented with PM targets. Responses to ongoing tasks are often slower with the addition of PM demands ("PM costs"). Prominent PM theories attribute costs to capacity-sharing between the ongoing and PM tasks, which reduces the rate of processing of the ongoing task.

Contextual cueing improves attentional guidance, even when guidance is supposedly optimal.

Visual search through previously encountered contexts typically produces reduced reaction times compared with search through novel contexts. This contextual cueing benefit is well established, but there is debate regarding its underlying mechanisms. Eye-tracking studies have consistently shown reduced number of fixations with repetition, supporting improvements in attentional guidance as the source of contextual cueing.

Rapid and selective updating of the target template in visual search.

Frequent target stimuli are detected more rapidly than infrequent ones. Here, we examined whether the frequency effect reflected durable attentional biases toward frequent target features, and whether the effect was confined to featural properties that defined the target. Participants searched for two specific target colors among distractors of heterogeneous colors and reported the line orientation of the target.