Sleep deprivation (SD) has been shown to affect selective attention but it is not known how two of its component processes: target enhancement and distractor suppression, are affected. To investigate, young volunteers either attended to houses or were obliged to ignore them (when attending to faces) while viewing superimposed face-house pictures. MR signal enhancement and suppression in the parahippocampal place area (PPA) were determined relative to a passive viewing control condition. Sleep deprivation was associated with lower PPA activation across conditions. Critically SD specifically impaired distractor suppression in selective attention, leaving target enhancement relatively preserved. These findings parallel some observations in cognitive aging. Additionally, following SD, attended houses were not significantly better recognized than ignored houses in a post-experiment test of recognition memory contrasting with the finding of superior recognition of attended houses in the well-rested state. These results provide evidence for co-encoding of distracting information with targets into memory when one is sleep deprived.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.02.081 | DOI Listing |
Interference from a salient distractor is typically reduced when the appearance of the distractor follows either spatial or feature-based regularities. Although there is a growing body of literature on distractor location learning, the understanding of distractor feature learning remains limited. In the current study, we investigated distractor feature learning by using EEG measures.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNavigating visually complex environments requires focusing on relevant information while filtering out (salient) distractions. The signal suppression hypothesis posits that salient stimuli generate an automatic saliency signal that captures attention unless overridden by learned suppression mechanisms. In support of this, ERP studies have demonstrated that salient stimuli that do not capture attention elicit a distractor positivity (PD), a putative neural index of suppression.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNat Hum Behav
January 2025
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis, St Louis, MO, USA.
Goal-directed behaviour requires humans to constantly manage and switch between multiple, independent and conflicting sources of information. Conventional cognitive control tasks, however, only feature one task and one source of distraction. Therefore, it is unclear how control is allocated in multidimensional environments.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAtten Percept Psychophys
December 2024
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, 19716-2577, USA.
In the attentional blink paradigm, participants attempt to identify two targets appearing in a rapidly presented stream of distractors. Report accuracy is typically high for the first target (T1) while identification of the second target (T2) is impaired when it follows within about 200-400 ms of T1. An important question is whether T2 is processed to a semantic level even when participants are unaware of its identity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBehav Res Methods
December 2024
Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA.
In the field of psychological science, behavioral performance in computer-based cognitive tasks often exhibits poor reliability. The absence of reliable measures of cognitive processes contributes to non-reproducibility in the field and impedes the investigation of individual differences. Specifically in visual search paradigms, response time-based measures have shown poor test-retest reliability and internal consistency across attention capture and distractor suppression, but one study has demonstrated the potential for oculomotor measures to exhibit superior reliability.
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