Parkinson's disease (PD) patients show signs of cognitive impairment, such as executive dysfunction, working memory problems and attentional disturbances, even in the early stages of the disease. Though motor symptoms of the disease are often successfully addressed by dopaminergic medication, it still remains unclear, how dopaminergic therapy affects cognitive function. The main objective of this study was to assess the effect of dopaminergic medication on visual and auditory attentional processing. 14 PD patients and 13 matched healthy controls performed a three-stimulus auditory and visual oddball task while their EEG was recorded. The patients performed the task twice, once on- and once off-medication. While the results showed no significant differences between PD patients and controls, they did reveal a significant increase in P3 amplitude on- vs. off-medication specific to processing of auditory distractors and no other stimuli. These results indicate significant effect of dopaminergic therapy on processing of distracting auditory stimuli. With a lack of between group differences the effect could reflect either 1) improved recruitment of attentional resources to auditory distractors; 2) reduced ability for cognitive inhibition of auditory distractors; 3) increased response to distractor stimuli resulting in impaired cognitive performance; or 4) hindered ability to discriminate between auditory distractors and targets. Further studies are needed to differentiate between these possibilities.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2015.02.001 | DOI Listing |
Biomimetics (Basel)
December 2024
Department of Systems Engineering and Automation, University Carlos III of Madrid, Av. de la Universidad, 30, 28911 Leganes, Spain.
The concept of joint attention holds significant importance in human interaction and is pivotal in establishing rapport, understanding, and effective communication. Within social robotics, enhancing user perception of the robot and promoting a sense of natural interaction with robots becomes a central element. In this sense, emulating human-centric qualities in social robots, such as joint attention, defined as the ability of two or more individuals to focus on a common event simultaneously, can increase their acceptability.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeural Netw
December 2024
WAVES Research Group, Department of Information Technology, Ghent University, Gent, Belgium. Electronic address:
Decoding visual and auditory stimuli from brain activities, such as electroencephalography (EEG), offers promising advancements for enhancing machine-to-human interaction. However, effectively representing EEG signals remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we introduce a novel Delayed Knowledge Transfer (DKT) framework that employs spiking neurons for attention detection, using our experimental EEG dataset.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMultisens Res
November 2024
Department of Cognitive Science, Faculty of Media and Knowledge Sciences, University of Malta, Msida, Malta.
In two experiments, we explored whether cross-modal cues can be used to improve foraging for multiple targets in a novel human foraging paradigm. Foraging arrays consisted of a 6 × 6 grid containing outline circles with a small dot on the circumference. Each dot rotated from a random starting location in steps of 30°, either clockwise or counterclockwise, around the circumference.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeuropsychologia
November 2024
Department of Educational Psychology and Counselling, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, 106308, Taiwan; Institute for Research Excellence in Learning Sciences, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, 106308, Taiwan. Electronic address:
Alpha oscillations are proposed to serve the function of inhibition to protect items in working memory from intruding information. In a modified Sternberg paradigm, alpha power was initially found to increase at the anticipation of strong compared to weak distractors, reflecting the active gating of distracting information from interfering with the memory trace. However, there was a lack of evidence supporting the inhibition account of alpha oscillations in later studies using similar experimental design with greater temporal disparity between the encoding phase and the presentation of the distractors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEur J Neurosci
December 2024
Department of Psychology, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.
When performing cognitive tasks in noisy conditions, the brain needs to maintain task performance while additionally controlling the processing of task-irrelevant and potentially distracting auditory stimuli. Previous research indicates that a fundamental mechanism by which this control is achieved is the attenuation of task-irrelevant processing, especially in conditions with high task demands. However, it remains unclear whether the processing of complex naturalistic sounds can be modulated as easily as that of simpler ones.
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