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Motivation and attention constitute major determinants of human perception and action. Nonetheless, it remains a matter of debate whether motivation effects on the visual cortex depend on the spatial attention system, or rely on independent pathways. This study investigated the impact of motivation and spatial attention on the activity of the human primary and extrastriate visual cortex by employing a factorial manipulation of the two factors in a cued pattern discrimination task. During stimulus presentation, we recorded event-related potentials and pupillary responses. Motivational relevance increased the amplitudes of the C1 component at ∼70 ms after stimulus onset. This modulation occurred independently of spatial attention effects, which were evident at the P1 level. Furthermore, motivation and spatial attention had independent effects on preparatory activation as measured by the contingent negative variation; and pupil data showed increased activation in response to incentive targets. Taken together, these findings suggest independent pathways for the influence of motivation and spatial attention on the activity of the human visual cortex.
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Meals, especially when taken in company, may affect the diner’s mood. In line with findings that mood may alter cognitive control, a previous study by the authors found that after solitary meals, the Simon effect was diminished as compared to a premeal condition, whereas a social meal did not reduce the Simon effect. Here, we investigated whether this finding generalizes across different demands in cognitive control and, therefore, applied a flanker task. Obtained questionnaire data indicated differential effects in mood and relaxation of a social as compared to a solitary meal. Replicating our previous findings, the flanker compatibility effect decreased after a solitary meal but increased after a social meal. The present results support our previous findings with new evidence that a meal taken in a social context attenuates subsequent cognitive control processes compared with a solitary meal.
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The current study aimed at validating whether the face stimuli of the Goettingen Faces Database (GFD) are perceived as emotionally neutral. Two-hundred-eighty neutral GFD stimuli were presented together with face stimuli depicting emotional expressions, selected from other databases. The valence of each picture was rated by N=50 participants on a scale from -3 (negative) to 3 (positive). Findings show that the median rating of each GFD image was zero (exactly neutral) with 88% of mean ratings lying between -0.5 and 0.5. The findings provide a selection tool for stimuli for future research based on valence perception, with the majority of stimuli being perceived as neutral and therefore suitable as neutral stimuli for future research on face perception.
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Recent findings from new implicit looking time tasks indicate that children show anticipatory looking patterns suggesting false belief processing from very early on; however, systematic and independent tests of their replicability and their convergent validity are still outstanding. The current paper reports three studies from two independent research labs that attempted to test the replicability and convergent validity (using correlation analyses) of the Southgate et al. (2007) and the Surian and Geraci (2012) paradigms. Results showed that the original findings can neither be replicated in children nor in elderly adults, and can only partially be replicated in adults. Furthermore, the two different paradigms did not correlate, which puts into question the convergent validity of these tasks as tapping the same capacity of an implicit Theory of Mind. In conclusion, the present studies suggest that the results from implicit Theory of Mind tasks should be treated with caution.
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Recent findings from new implicit looking time tasks indicate that children show anticipatory looking patterns suggesting false belief processing from very early on; however, systematic and independent tests of their replicability and their convergent validity are still outstanding. The current paper reports three studies from two independent research labs that attempted to test the replicability and convergent validity (using correlation analyses) of the Southgate et al. (2007) and the Surian and Geraci (2012) paradigms. Results showed that the original findings can neither be replicated in children nor in elderly adults, and can only partially be replicated in adults. Furthermore, the two different paradigms did not correlate, which puts into question the convergent validity of these tasks as tapping the same capacity of an implicit Theory of Mind. In conclusion, the present studies suggest that the results from implicit Theory of Mind tasks should be treated with caution.
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The postgraduate community is far more complex and diverse both in its requirements and expectations of postgraduate courses than its undergraduate colleagues. This diversity of background and experience is addressed in this book, reflecting the differing needs and aspirations of postgraduate students. Each postgraduate student experiences their education with a set of challenges unique to them. The aim of Postgraduate Study in the UK: Surviving and Succeeding is to reflect some of these challenges through the lived experiences of others. The book highlights some of the difficulties that can occur when studying (such as having to interrupt due to bereavement) and offers advice on how to manage these situations. The authors use their own experiences but the advice is more general e.g. whatever your reason for interrupting, the process is explained and advice provided. Students feel they are not alone in their experiences, situations are therefore normalized and practical advice is provided on how to manage. The book is an honest account of real people s experiences, it is like asking a friend for advice knowing the response will be clear, useful and positive.
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The Fixation Shift Paradigm (FSP) measures infants’ ability to shift gaze from a central fixation stimulus to a peripheral target (e.g. Hood & Atkinson, 1993: Infant Behavior and Development, 16(4), 405–422). Cortical maturation has been suggested as crucial for the developing ability to shift attention. This study investigated the development of neural mechanisms by combining EEG with simultaneous eye tracking during FSP testing, in typically developing infants aged between 1 and 8 months. The most prominent neural response was a frontal positivity which occurred only in the hemisphere contralateral to the target in the youngest infants but became more ipsilateral with age. This changing lateralisation was associated with improving ability to shift attention (decreasing saccade latencies and fewer ‘sticky fixations’—failures to disengage attention from the central target). These findings suggest that the lateralisation of neural responses develops during infancy, possibly due to developing intracortical connections, allowing infants to shift attention more efficiently.
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This study measured changes in switches of attention between 1 and 9 months of age in 67 typically developing infants. Remote eye-tracking (Tobii X120) was used to measure saccadic latencies, related to switches of fixation, as a measure of shifts of attention, from a central stimulus to a peripheral visual target, measured in the Fixation Shift Paradigm. Fixation shifts occur later if the central fixation stimulus stays visible when the peripheral target appears (competition condition), than if the central stimulus disappears as the peripheral target appears (non-competition condition). This difference decreases with age. Our results show significantly faster disengagement in infants over 4 months than in the younger group, and provide more precise measures of fixation shifts, than behavioural observation with the same paradigm. Reduced saccadic latencies in the course of a test session indicate a novel learning effect. The Fixation Shift Paradigm combined with remote eye-tracking measures showed improved temporal and spatial accuracy compared to direct observation by a trained observer, and allowed an increased number of trials in a short testing time. This makes it an infant-friendly non-invasive procedure, involving minimal observational training, suitable for use in future studies of clinical populations to detect early attentional abnormalities in the first few months of life.
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The postgraduate community is far more complex and diverse both in its requirements and expectations of postgraduate courses than its undergraduate colleagues. This diversity of background and experience is addressed in this book, reflecting the differing needs and aspirations of postgraduate students. Each postgraduate student experiences their education with a set of challenges unique to them. The aim of Postgraduate Study in the UK: Surviving and Succeeding is to reflect some of these challenges through the lived experiences of others. The book highlights some of the difficulties that can occur when studying (such as having to interrupt due to bereavement) and offers advice on how to manage these situations. The authors use their own experiences but the advice is more general e.g. whatever your reason for interrupting, the process is explained and advice provided. Students feel they are not alone in their experiences, situations are therefore normalized and practical advice is provided on how to manage. The book is an honest account of real people s experiences, it is like asking a friend for advice knowing the response will be clear, useful and positive.
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Facial attractiveness is an important source of social affective information. Here, we studied the time course and task dependence of evaluating attractive faces from a viewer's perspective. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants classified color portraits of unfamiliar persons according to gender and facial attractiveness. During attractiveness classification, enhanced ERP amplitudes for attractive and nonattractive faces relative to faces of intermediate attractiveness were found for an early component around 150 msec and for the late positive complex (LPC). Whereas LPC enhancement conforms to previous studies employing various types of affective stimuli, the finding of an early effect extends earlier research on rapid emotion processing to the dimension of facial attractiveness. Dipole source localization of this early ERP effect revealed a scalp distribution suggesting activation of posterior extrastriate areas. Importantly, attractiveness-related modulations of brain responses were only marginal during the gender decision task, arguing against the automaticity of attractiveness appraisal.
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Background A crucial question for understanding sentence comprehension is the openness of syntactic and semantic processes for other sources of information. Using event-related potentials in a dual task paradigm, we had previously found that sentence processing takes into consideration task relevant sentence-external semantic but not syntactic information. In that study, internal and external information both varied within the same linguistic domain—either semantic or syntactic. Here we investigated whether across-domain sentence-external information would impact within-sentence processing. Methodology In one condition, adjectives within visually presented sentences of the structure [Det]-[Noun]-[Adjective]-[Verb] were semantically correct or incorrect. Simultaneously with the noun, auditory adjectives were presented that morphosyntactically matched or mismatched the visual adjectives with respect to gender. Findings As expected, semantic violations within the sentence elicited N400 and P600 components in the ERP. However, these components were not modulated by syntactic matching of the sentence-external auditory adjective. In a second condition, syntactic within-sentence correctness-variations were combined with semantic matching variations between the auditory and the visual adjective. Here, syntactic within-sentence violations elicited a LAN and a P600 that did not interact with semantic matching of the auditory adjective. However, semantic mismatching of the latter elicited a frontocentral positivity, presumably related to an increase in discourse level complexity. Conclusion The current findings underscore the open versus algorithmic nature of semantic and syntactic processing, respectively, during sentence comprehension.
