Behavioral studies have reported interactions between number processing and spatial attention, suggesting that number processing involves shifting attention along a mental continuum on which numbers are represented in ascending order. However, direct evidence for attention shifts remains scarce, the respective contribution of the horizontal and…

Since subthreshold autistic social impairments aggregate in family members, and since attentional dysfunctions appear to be one of the earliest cognitive markers of children with autism, we investigated in the general population the relationship between infants' attentional functioning and the autistic traits measured in their parents.…

Caparos and Linnell (2009, 2010) used a variable-separation flanker paradigm to show that (a) when cognitive load is low, increasing perceptual load causes spatial attention to focus and (b) when perceptual load is high, decreasing cognitive load causes spatial attention to focus. Here, we tested whether the effects of perceptual and cognitive…

The dual-stage two-phase (DSTP) model is introduced as a formal and general model of selective attention that includes both an early and a late stage of stimulus selection. Whereas at the early stage information is selected by perceptual filters whose selectivity is relatively limited, at the late stage stimuli are selected more efficiently on a…

Attentional capture for distractors is enhanced by increasing the difficulty of discrimination between the standard and the target in the three-stimulus oddball paradigm. In this study, we investigated the cognitive mechanism of this modulation of attentional capture. Event-related brain potentials were recorded from participants while they…

This research examined changes in the spatial extent of focal attention over time. The Attentional Blink (impaired perception of the second of two targets) and Lag-1 sparing (the seemingly paradoxical finding that second-target accuracy is high when the second target immediately follows the first) were employed in a dual-stream paradigm to index…

There is evidence that the efficiency of selective attention depends on the availability of cognitive control mechanisms as distractor processing has been found to increase with high load on working memory or dual task coordination (Lavie, Hirst, de Fockert, & Viding, 2004). We tested the prediction that cognitive control load would also…

The functional organization of working memory (WM) in the human prefrontal cortex remains unclear. The present study used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to clarify the role of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) both in the types of information (verbal vs. spatial), and the types of processes (maintenance vs.…

We compared the ability of auditory, visual, and audiovisual (bimodal) exogenous cues to capture visuo-spatial attention under conditions of no load versus high perceptual load. Participants had to discriminate the elevation (up vs. down) of visual targets preceded by either unimodal or bimodal cues under conditions of high perceptual load (in…

A theory is presented that attempts to answer two questions. What visual contents can an observer consciously access at one moment? Answer: only one feature value (e.g., green) per dimension, but those feature values can be associated (as a group) with multiple spatially precise locations (comprising a single labeled Boolean map). How can an…

This study used saccadic eye movements to assess visuospatial attention in 53 normal children (ages 8-15). Saccadic latency, the ability to suppress extraneous saccades during fixation, and the ability to inhibit task-provoked anticipatory saccades all improved with age. Developmental patterns varied by task. Analyses of age-related changes may be…