Attention: Research reports

Improving attention

August 2006

Novelty aids learning

We’ve long suspected that the human brain is particularly attracted to new information. Research now reveals that the brain region that regulates our levels of motivation and our ability to predict rewards, by releasing dopamine in the frontal and temporal regions of the brain, responds better to novelty than to the familiar. Behavioral experiments also revealed that participants best remembered the images they had been shown when new images were mixed in with slightly familiar images during learning. It’s worth noting that this midbrain area (substantia nigra/ventral tegmentum) responded strongly only to completely new stimuli.
The study was published in the 3 August issue of Neuron. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-08/ucl-nal073106.htm

June 2005

Meditation skills of Buddhist monks yield clues to brain's regulation of attention

Recent research has suggested that skilled meditation can alter certain aspects of the brain's neural activity. A new study has now found evidence that certain types of trained meditative practice can influence the conscious experience of visual perceptual rivalry, a phenomenon thought to involve brain mechanisms that regulate attention and conscious awareness. Perceptual rivalry arises normally when two different images are presented to each eye, and it is manifested as a fluctuation in the "dominant" image that is consciously perceived. The study involved 76 Tibetan Buddhist monks with training ranging from 5 to 54 years. Tested during the practice of two types of meditation: a "compassion"-oriented meditation (contemplation of suffering within the world), and "one-point" meditation (involving the maintained focus of attention on a single object or thought). Major increases in the durations of perceptual dominance were experienced by monks practicing one-point meditation, but not during compassion-oriented meditation. Additionally, under normal conditions the monks showed longer stable perception (average 4.1 seconds compared to 2.6 seconds for meditation-naïve control subjects). The findings suggest that processes particularly associated with one-point meditation can considerably alter the normal fluctuations in conscious state that are induced by perceptual rivalry.
The study was reported in the June 7 issue of Current Biology. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-06/cp-mso060205.htm

September 2001

Children who concentrate and switch attention better are more likely to cross streets safely

How can we help kids cross streets more safely? Improving their abilities to concentrate and switch their attention may be part of the answer. British psychologists studied these two central attentional skills in children ages four to 10 in relation to how safely they crossed the street. The results suggest that children who can concentrate and switch their attention better may cross more safely. The study used a computer game to gauge the “attention switching” skills of 101 children. Distractability and impulsivity were also measured, in a representative sample of 35 children. These 35 children were then covertly videotaped crossing streets (with their parents). Attentional skills significantly correlated with pedestrian behavior, in different ways. Children who were better at switching attention on the Frog Game were more likely to look at traffic when about to cross a road. Children who were less able to concentrate in the lab when challenged by a distraction also tended to be more impulsive; children rated as more impulsive tended to cross the road in a less controlled way. The biggest improvements seemed to come between the group of four-five year olds and the group of five-six year olds, the difference between preschool and kindergarten age. Finally, concentration, but not switching, correlated with impulsivity, suggesting that these two skills (concentration and attention switching) represent distinct aspects of attention.
The findings appear in the September issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2001-09/apa-cwc091001.htm

April 2001

Skill-specific exercises better for people who suffer from attention problems following stroke or brain injury

Treatment programs for people who suffer from attention problems following a stroke or other traumatic brain injuries often involve abstract cognitive exercises designed to directly restore impaired attention processes. But a review of 30 studies involving a total of 359 participants shows that an alternative and lesser-used therapy that teaches patients to relearn the tasks that affect their daily lives the most may be more effective. In this specific skills approach, people with brain damage learn to perform attention skills in a way that is different from non-brain-damaged people. In one study, for example, participants whose brain injuries affected their ability to drive a car used small electric cars in the lab to practice specific driving exercises, such as steering between pylons that were moved closer and closer together. Those that practiced specific exercises showed substantial improvement on a variety of driving related tasks compared to those who drove the car, but did not practice the exercises.
The study appears in the April issue of Neuropsychology.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2001-04/APA-Rlsm-0704101.htm

Age and individual differences

October 2005

Changes in brain, not age, determine one's ability to focus on task

It’s been established that one of the reasons why older adults may do less well on cognitive tasks is because they have greater difficulty in ignoring distractions, which impairs their concentration. But not all older people are afflicted by this. Some are as focused as young adults. An imaging study has now revealed a difference between the brains of those people who are good at focusing, and those who are poor. Those who have difficulty screening out distractions have less white matter in the frontal lobes. They activated neurons in the left frontal lobe as well as the right. Young people and high-functioning older adults tended to use only the right frontal lobe.
The study was reported in the September issue of Psychology and Aging. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-10/uoia-cib102605.htm

September 2005

Memory loss in older adults due to distractions, not inability to focus

We know that older adults often have short-term memory problems, and this has been linked to problems with attention. An imaging study now provides evidence that these short-term memory problems are associated with an inability to filter out surrounding distractions, rather than problems with focusing attention. It’s been suggested that an inability to ignore distracting information may indeed be at the heart of many of the cognitive problems that accompany aging. It should be noted that this is not an inevitable effect of age — in the study, 6 of the 16 older adults involved had no problems with short-term memory or attention.
The report appeared online on September 11 in Nature Neuroscience. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-09/uoc--mli090805.htm

August 2005

Insight into the processes of 'positive' and 'negative' learners

An intriguing study of the electrical signals emanating from the brain has revealed two types of learners. A brainwave event called an "event-related potential" (ERP) is important in learning; a particular type of ERP called "error-related negativity" (ERN), is associated with activity in the anterior cingulate cortex. This region is activated during demanding cognitive tasks, and ERNs are typically more negative after participants make incorrect responses compared to correct choices. Unexpectedly, studies of this ERN found a difference between "positive" learners, who perform better at choosing the correct response than avoiding the wrong one, and "negative" learners, who learn better to avoid incorrect responses. The negative learners showed larger ERNs, suggesting that "these individuals are more affected by, and therefore learn more from, their errors.” Positive learners had larger ERNs when faced with high-conflict win/win decisions among two good options than during lose/lose decisions among two bad options, whereas negative learners showed the opposite pattern.
The report appeared in the August 18 issue of Neuron. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-08/cp-iit081205.htm

How attention works

March 2007

Disentangling attention

A new study provides more evidence that the ability to deliberately focus your attention is physically separate in the brain from the part that helps you filter out distraction. The study trained monkeys to take attention tests on a video screen in return for a treat of apple juice. When the monkeys voluntarily concentrated (‘top-down’ attention), the prefrontal cortex was active, but when something distracting grabbed their attention (‘bottom-up’ attention), the parietal cortex became active. The electrical activity in these two areas vibrated in synchrony as they signaled each other, but top-down attention involved synchrony that was stronger in the lower-frequencies and bottom-up attention involved higher frequencies. These findings may help us develop treatments for attention disorders.
The study was published in the March 30 issue of Science. Full reference
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2007/03/29/attention_hea.html?category=health

January 2005

Faces must be seen to be recognized

In an interesting new perspective on face recognition, a series of perception experiments have revealed that identifying a face depends on actually seeing it, as opposed to merely having the image of the face fall on the retina. In other words, attention is necessary.
The study was published in the January 6 issue of Neuron. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-01/cp-fmb122904.htm

February 2004

More light shed on memory encoding

Anything we perceive contains a huge amount of sensory information. How do we decide what bits to process? New research has identified brain cells that streamline and simplify sensory information, markedly reducing the brain's workload. The study found that when monkeys were taught to remember clip art pictures, their brains reduced the level of detail by sorting the pictures into categories for recall, such as images that contained "people," "buildings," "flowers," and "animals." The categorizing cells were found in the hippocampus. As humans do, different monkeys categorized items in different ways, selectingdifferent aspects of the same stimulus image, most likely reflectingdifferent histories, strategies, and expectations residing within individual hippocampal networks.
The findings are reported in the March 2 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-02/wfub-nfo022604.htm

January 2003

Neural circuits that control eye movements play crucial role in visual attention

Everyone agrees that to improve your memory it is important to “pay attention”. Unfortunately, noone really knows how to improve our ability to “pay attention”. An important step in telling us how visual attention works was recently made in a study that looked at the brain circuits that control eye movements. It appears that those brain circuits that program eye movements also govern whether the myriad signals that pour in from the locations where the eyes could move should be amplified or suppressed. It appears that the very act of preparing to move the eye to a particular location can cause an amplification (or suppression) of signals from that area. This is possible because humans and primates can attend to something without moving their eyes to that object.
The report was published in the Jan. 23 issue of Nature. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-01/pu-ssh012303.htm

October 2002

Different aspects of attention located in different parts of the brain

We all know attention is important, but we’ve never been sure exactly what it is. Recent research suggests there’s good reason for this – attention appears to be multi-faceted, far less simple than originally conceived. Patients with specific lesions in the frontal lobes and other parts of the brain have provided evidence that different types of attentional problems are associated with injuries in different parts of the brain, suggesting that attention is not, as has been thought, a global process. The researchers have found evidence for at least three distinct processes, each located in different parts of the frontal lobes. These are: (1) a system that helps us maintain a general state of readiness to respond, in the superior medial frontal regions; (2) a system that sets our threshold for responding to an external stimulus, in the left dorsolateral region; and (3) a system that helps us selectively attend to appropriate stimuli, in the right dorsolateral region.
A report on these findings appears in the October issue of Neuropsychology. Full reference
Full text of the article available at http://www.apa.org/journals/neu/press_releases/october_2002/neu164500.html
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-10/apa-pda100702.htm

October 2001

Learning without desire or awareness

We have long known that learning can occur without attention. A recent study demonstrates learning that occurs without attention, without awareness and without any task relevance. Subjects were repeatedly presented with a background motion signal so weak that its direction was not visible; the invisible motion was an irrelevant background to the central task that engaged the subject's attention. Despite being below the threshold of visibility and being irrelevant to the central task, the repetitive exposure improved performance specifically for the direction of the exposed motion when tested in a subsequent suprathreshold test. These results suggest that a frequently presented feature sensitizes the visual system merely owing to its frequency, not its relevance or salience.
The report appeared in the 25 October issue of Nature. Full reference
http://www.nature.com/nsu/011025/011025-12.html
http://tinyurl.com/ix98

Making attention worse

July 2002

Cognitive impairment following bypass surgery may last longer than thought

More support for a link between cardiopulmonary bypass surgery and cognitive impairment comes from a new study. In particular, it seems, that attention may be most affected. The study also found evidence of longer-lasting cognitive decline than previously thought. Bypass patients also demonstrated poorer cognitive performance before the surgery, and it is now being suggested that it may be the disease itself that is the major problem, rather than the surgery itself. This is consistent with recent research connecting cardiovascular risk factors with risk factors for cognitive decline.
The study appeared in the July issue of Neuropsychology. Full reference http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-07/apa-lci070802.htm
Full text available at http://www.apa.org/journals/neu/press_releases/july_2002/neu163411.html)

February 2002

Cocaine may permanently damage learning abilities in developing fetuses

Two recent studies investigating the effect of pre-natal exposure to cocaine in rats suggest that children exposed to cocaine while in the womb may have permanent changes to the part of the brain that helps control attention and memory, leading to learning deficits and symptoms that are very much like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
The studies appeared in Behavioural Brain Research and Neuropsychopharmacology. Full references
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-02/yu-ucd021802.htm