Individual differences in attentional control predict working memory capacity in adults who stutter.

Purpose: Prior research has suggested that people who stutter exhibit differences in some working memory tasks, particularly when more phonologically complex stimuli are used. This study aimed to further specify working memory differences in adults who stutter by not only accounting for linguistic demands of the stimuli but also individual differences in attentional control and experimental influences, such as concomitant processing requirements.

Method: This study included 40 adults who stutter and 42 adults who do not stutter who completed the Attention Network Test (ANT; Fan et al.

Control preference persists with age.

The opportunity to exert control in one's environment is desirable, and individuals are willing to seek out control, even at a financial cost. Additionally, control-related activation of reward regions in the brain and the positive affect associated with the opportunity to exert control suggest that control is rewarding. The present study explores whether there are age-related differences in the preference for control.

Gotcha: Working memory prioritization from automatic attentional biases.

Attention is an important resource for prioritizing information in working memory (WM), and it can be deployed both strategically and automatically. Most research investigating the relationship between WM and attention has focused on strategic efforts to deploy attentional resources toward remembering relevant information. However, such voluntary attentional control represents a mere subset of the attentional processes that select information to be encoded and maintained in WM (Theeuwes, Journal of Cognition, 1[1]: 29, 1-15, 2018).

Is it worth it? The costs and benefits of bringing a laptop to a university class.

Students often bring laptops to university classes, however, they do not limit their laptop use to class-related activity. Off-task laptop use occurs frequently in university classrooms and this use negatively impacts learning. The present study addresses whether potential benefits of class-related laptop use might mitigate the costs of off-task laptop activity.

Attention induces surround suppression in visual working memory.

Controversy currently exists regarding whether visual working memory (VWM) maintains sensory or non-sensory representations. Here, we tested the nature of VWM representations by leveraging a perceptual surround suppression effect when an item is attended. Participants performed a delayed-estimation task in which they memorized an array of six colors.

Stimulus-driven attention and cognitive control during encoding: An event related brain potentials study.

Stimulus-driven attention drawn to relevant items can improve working memory (WM) whether attentional capture is driven by salient, low level features or by contingent salience from shared features with targets. In the current work, we examined the time course of enhanced attention to contingently salient information in a non-spatial WM task using event related brain potentials (ERPs). In line with previous work, we predicted that the encoding of contingently salient stimuli would be associated with an enhancement of cognitive control processes rather than low-level salience detection.

Logged In and Zoned Out.

Laptop computers are widely prevalent in university classrooms. Although laptops are a valuable tool, they offer access to a distracting temptation: the Internet. In the study reported here, we assessed the relationship between classroom performance and actual Internet usage for academic and nonacademic purposes.

Where to start? Bottom-up attention improves working memory by determining encoding order.

The present study aimed to characterize the mechanism by which working memory is enhanced for items that capture attention because of their novelty or saliency-that is, via bottom-up attention. The first experiment replicated previous research by corroborating that bottom-up attention directed to an item is sufficient for enhancing working memory and, moreover, generalized the effect to the domain of verbal working memory. The subsequent 3 experiments sought to determine how bottom-up attention affects working memory.

Neural Mechanisms for the Benefits of Stimulus-Driven Attention.

Stimulus-driven attention can improve working memory (WM) when drawn to behaviorally relevant information, but the neural mechanisms underlying this effect are unclear. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test competing hypotheses regarding the nature of the benefits of stimulus-driven attention to WM: that stimulus-driven attention benefits WM directly via salience detection, that stimulus-driven attention benefits WM incidentally via cognitive control mechanisms recruited to reduce interference from salient features, or that both mechanisms are co-involved in enhancing WM for salient information. To test these hypotheses, we observed activation in brain regions associated with cognitive control and salience detection.

The nature of working memory gating in Parkinson's disease: A multi-domain signal detection examination.

Distractions are ubiquitous; our brains are inundated with task-irrelevant information. Thus, to remember successfully, one must actively maintain relevant information and prevent distraction from entering working memory. Researchers suggest the basal ganglia-prefrontal pathways are vital to this process by acting as a working memory gate.

Ventral fronto-parietal contributions to the disruption of visual working memory storage.

The ability to maintain information in visual working memory (VWM) in the presence of ongoing visual input allows for flexible goal-directed behavior. Previous evidence suggests that categorical overlap between visual distractors and the contents of VWM is associated with both the degree to which distractors disrupt VWM performance and activation among fronto-parietal regions of cortex. While within-category distractors have been shown to elicit a greater response in ventral fronto-parietal regions, to date, no study has linked distractor-evoked response of these regions to VWM performance costs.

An inability to set independent attentional control settings by hemifield.

Recent evidence suggests that people can simultaneously activate attentional control setting for two distinct colors. However, it is unclear whether both attentional control settings must operate globally across the visual field or whether each can be constrained to a particular spatial location. Using two different paradigms, we investigated participants' ability to apply independent color attentional control settings to distinct regions of space.

Functional specialization of the left ventral parietal cortex in working memory.

The function of the ventral parietal cortex (VPC) is subject to much debate. Many studies suggest a lateralization of function in the VPC, with the left hemisphere facilitating verbal working memory and the right subserving stimulus-driven attention. However, many attentional tasks elicit activity in the VPC bilaterally.

Motivational enhancement of cognitive control depends on depressive symptoms.

Performance feedback can motivate improvements in executive function (Ravizza, Goudreau, Delgado, & Ruiz, 2012). The present study examines whether the enhancement of task switching with performance feedback is modulated by the level of depressive symptoms. Depressive symptoms have been linked to deficits in processing affective information inherent to such feedback (Henriques, Glowacki, & Davidson, 1994; Pizzagalli, Jahn, & O'Shea, 2005).

The effect of Twitter exposure on false memory formation.

Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter have increased drastically in popularity. However, information on these sites is not verified and may contain inaccuracies. It is well-established that false information encountered after an event can lead to memory distortion.

Restricted and repetitive behaviors in autism spectrum disorders: the relationship of attention and motor deficits.

Restricted and repetitive behaviors (RRBs) are hallmark symptoms of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs); however, it has proven difficult to understand the mechanisms underlying these behaviors. One hypothesis suggests that RRBs are the result of a core deficit in attention. Alternatively, abnormalities of the motor system may constitute the central mechanism underlying RRBs, given motor deficits observed in ASDs.

Do brain activation changes persist in athletes with a history of multiple concussions who are asymptomatic?

Primary Objective: To evaluate brain activation patterns of asymptomatic athletes with a history of two or more concussions.

Research Design: A paired case-control design was used to evaluate brain activation patterns during cognitive performance in 14 athletes with a history of two or more concussions and 14 age- and sex-matched controls with no previous concussion.

Methods And Procedures: Percentage Blood-Oxygen-Level-Dependent (BOLD) change during an N-back working memory task was assessed in all participants.

Cognitive control: preparation of task switching components.

Task performance often improves when tasks can be prepared in advance. However, the mechanisms that support advance preparation are highly debated. Proceeding under the hypothesis that switch-specific neural activation during advance preparation is the hallmark of controlled processing, this study investigates the behavioral and neural effects of component preparation during task-switching.

Overlapping cognitive patterns in schizophrenia and methamphetamine dependence.

Objective: To examine whether overlapping cognitive deficits exist in currently drug-abstinent chronic methamphetamine (MA) abusers and schizophrenia (SZ) patients.

Background: Both SZ and chronic MA abuse are associated with frontostriatal disruption as well as deficits in cognitive control, such as selective attention. To identify overlapping cognitive profiles, we compared performance of the 2 groups on the Stroop attention task.

Executive function in Parkinson's disease: contributions of the dorsal frontostriatal pathways to action and motivation.

Disruption of the dorsal frontostriatal pathways in Parkinson's disease (PD) is associated with impairments in motivation, as well as in executive function. The goal of this study was to investigate whether these impairments are related and, if so, whether the disruption of frontostriatal pathways compromises the ability to process the motivational aspects of feedback in such tasks. In Experiment 1, informative feedback improved the performance of young, healthy participants in a task-switching paradigm.

Left TPJ activity in verbal working memory: implications for storage- and sensory-specific models of short term memory.

Patients with damage to the left temporoparietal junction (TPJ) have a low verbal span without concomitant deficits in speech perception. This pattern of cognitive impairment is taken as evidence for a dedicated phonological buffer that plays little role in perception (storage-specific account). In contrast, other research suggests that items are maintained and perceived in the same regions (sensory-specific account).

The impact of context processing deficits on task-switching performance in schizophrenia.

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) has been described as important for maintaining and implementing contextual information in the service of goal-oriented behavior. Accordingly, impairments in context processing are thought to underlie cognitive deficits associated with schizophrenia, a clinical disorder that has been linked to PFC dysfunction (Servan-Schreiber et al., 1996).

A functional and structural study of emotion and face processing in children with autism.

Children with autism exhibit impairment in the processing of socioemotional information. The amygdala, a core structure centrally involved in socioemotional functioning, has been implicated in the neuropathology of autism. We collected structural and functional magnetic resonance images (MRI) in children 8 to 12 years of age with high-functioning autism (n=12) and typical development (n=15).

The neural substrates of cognitive control deficits in autism spectrum disorders.

Executive function deficits are among the most frequently reported symptoms of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), however, there have been few functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies that investigate the neural substrates of executive function deficits in ASDs, and only one in adolescents. The current study examined cognitive control - the ability to maintain task context online to support adaptive functioning in the face of response competition - in 22 adolescents aged 12-18 with autism spectrum disorders and 23 age, gender, and IQ matched typically developing subjects. During the cue phase of the task, where subjects must maintain information online to overcome a prepotent response tendency, typically developing subjects recruited significantly more anterior frontal (BA 10), parietal (BA 7 and BA 40), and occipital regions (BA 18) for high control trials (25% of trials) versus low control trials (75% of trials).