Selective attention in the presence of distraction is a key aspect of healthy cognition. The underlying neurobiological processes, have not, however, been functionally well characterized. In the present study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to determine how ecologically relevant distracting noise affects cortical activity in 27…

Previous studies have asked whether visual sensitivity and attentional processing in deaf signers are enhanced or altered as a result of their different sensory experiences during development, i.e., auditory deprivation and exposure to a visual language. In particular, deaf and hearing signers have been shown to exhibit a right visual field/left…

Developmental studies have demonstrated that cognitive processes such as attention, suppression of interference and memory develop throughout childhood and adolescence. However, little is currently known about the development of top-down control mechanisms and their influence on cognitive performance. In the present study, we used functional…

Keeping aware of the locations of objects while one is moving requires the updating of spatial representations. As long as the objects are visible, attentional tracking is sufficient, but knowing where objects out of view went in relation to one's own body involves an updating of spatial working memory. Here, multiple object tracking was employed…

The study investigated whether 10-week soccer training can benefit the inhibitory control and neuroelectric indices in children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD). Fifty-one children were divided into groups of typically developing (TD, n = 21), DCD-training (n = 16), and DCD non-training (n=14) individuals using the for Children test,…

Glucocorticoid administration has been shown to exert complex effects on cognitive and emotional processing. In the current study we investigated the effects of glucocorticoid administration on attention towards emotional words, using an Affective Go/No-go task on which healthy humans have shown an attentional bias towards positive as compared to…

Participants made categorical or coordinate spatial judgments on the global or local elements of shapes. Stimuli were composed of a horizontal line and two dots. In the Categorical task, participants judged whether the line was above or below the dots. In the Coordinate task, they judged whether the line would fit between the dots. Stimuli were…

Despite the fact that hemispheric asymmetry of attention has been widely studied, a clear picture of this complex phenomenon is still lacking. The aim of the present study was to provide an efficient and reliable measurement of potential hemispheric asymmetries of three attentional networks, i.e. alerting, orienting and executive attention.…

Valence-specific laterality effects have been frequently obtained in facial emotion perception but not in vocal emotion perception. We report a dichotic listening study further examining whether valence-specific laterality effects generalise to vocal emotions. Based on previous literature, we tested whether valence-specific laterality effects were…

It has previously been shown that task performance and frontal cortical activation increase after cognitive conflict. This has been argued to support a model of attention where the level of conflict automatically adjusts the amount of cognitive control applied. Conceivably, conflict could also modulate lower-level processing pathways, which would…

Functional Transcranial Doppler sonography (fTCD) has been applied to assess peak mean cerebral blood flow velocity (MFV) with a high temporal resolution during cognitive activation. Yet, little attention has been devoted to gender-related alterations of MFV, including spectral analysis. In healthy subjects, fTCD was used to investigate a series…

Anxiety is typically considered an impediment to cognition. We propose anxiety-related impairments in cognitive-behavioral performance are the consequences of enhanced stimulus-driven attention. Accordingly, reflexive, habitual behaviors that rely on stimulus-driven mechanisms should be facilitated in an anxious state, while novel, flexible…

Accuracy for a second target (T2) is reduced when it is presented within 500 ms of a first target (T1) in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP)--an attentional blink (AB). There are reliable individual differences in the magnitude of the AB. Recent evidence has shown that the attentional approach that an individual typically adopts during a…

Thinking about the abstract concept power may automatically activate the spatial up-down image schema ("powerful up"; "powerless down") and consequently direct spatial attention to the image schema-congruent location. Participants indicated whether a word represented a powerful or powerless person (e.g. "king" or "servant"). Following each…

One conception of inhibitory functioning suggests that the ability to successfully inhibit a predominant response depends mainly on the strength of that response, the general functioning of working memory processes, and the working memory demand of the task (Roberts, Hager, & Heron, 1994). The proposal that inhibition and functional working memory…