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PubMed2004

Joint attention and children with autism: a review of the literature.

Preverbal communication and joint attention have long been of interest to researchers and practitioners. Both attending to social partners and sharing attentional focus between objects or events and others precede the onset of a child's first lexicon. In addition, these prelinguistic acts also appear to have important implications with regard to learning to socialize. The construct of joint attention has been noted as an early developing area prior to the transition to symbolic communication. Thus, the importance of joint attention in typically developing children, and the lack thereof in children with autism, has interested researchers for use in diagnosis and intervention for autism. That is, joint attention has been gaining momentum as an area that not only helps characterize children with autism, but also as a prognostic indicator and a potential intervention goal. In this paper, the status of the literature about initiation of joint attention by young typically developing children and young children with autism was examined. Empirical studies regarding joint attention behaviors, including eye gaze alternation, the use of protodeclaratives and protoimperatives, and studies that investigated joint attention as a predictor of language acquisition were reviewed. Possible areas for future research for children with autism are discussed.

Attention↗

PubMed1995

Attentional effects in dichotic listening.

This study addresses attentional effects in dichotic listening (DL) to consonant-vowel syllables. Previous research has shown that ear advantages in DL are modulated by biased attention to either the left or the right ear. Attentional effects in DL can be the result of two processes: facilitation of reports from the attended ear, or suppression of intrusions from the nonattended ear. Sixty-two students were tested with DL under three different task instructions: nonforced (divided) attention, attention forced to the right ear, and attention forced to the left ear. The main finding was inhibition of intrusions from the nonattended ear, combined with the facilitation of the correct reports from the attended ear during the two forced-attention conditions, compared with the nonforced condition. The results are discussed in relation to right hemisphere processing of dichotic input, and that attention may activate subcortically biased asymmetries which suppress input from the nonattended channel.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed1997

Distractibility in infancy: the effects of distractor characteristics and type of attention.

Two experiments investigated the role of distractor characteristics and type of object-directed attention on infants' distraction latencies during object exploration. In Experiment 1, 7- and 10-month-old infants' distraction latency was a function of both attention and the characteristics of the distractors. Infants took longer to turn toward distractors during focused object-directed attention than when engaged in more casual attention. In addition, their latencies were longer regardless of attention type when the distractors were unimodal (e.g., consisting of only a visual or an auditory component) than when they were bimodal (e.g., consisting of both auditory and visual components). Experiment 2 demonstrated that infants exhibit shorter distraction latencies toward complex than simple bimodal distractors. These results are discussed in the context of Allport's (1989) model of attention and suggest that infants' allocation of attentional resources, as measured by distraction latencies, is influenced both by the characteristics of the distractor and by the type of infants' object-directed attention.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed1996

Behavioral and pharmacological studies on the validation of a new animal model for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Childhood hyperactivity (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD) is a common behavior disorder among grade-school children. The characteristic symptoms are attentional problems and hyperkinesia. A number of animal models for ADHD syndrome have been developed, but very few of these models are truly representative in that they rarely describe both hyperactivity and attentional problems. Frequently the disorder has been induced in animals by pharmacological manipulations or exogenous brain lesions which are distinct from the disturbances in normal developmental processes which ultimately lead to ADHD. The main purpose of the present research was to develop a new animal model of ADHD, such that it would include an attention deficit, hyperactivity and alleviation by treatment with a psychostimulant. We used rats trained for a 5-choice serial reaction time task which assessed sustained attention. In this behavioral paradigm, rats are required to discriminate spatially a short visual stimulus that will occur randomly in one of five locations and have to maintain an adequate activity level. The ability of a rat to maintain its attention on the task can be measured by counting choice accuracy (percent correct responses), whereas percentage of premature responses indicates the level of motoric activity. According to the present results, rats performing poorly in the task have poorer choice accuracy and they make more premature responses than well performing individuals, i.e., a clear correlation was observed between these parameters (r = -0.59, p < .001). Interestingly, choice accuracy of poorly performing rats was found to be better at the beginning of testing, but it became impaired toward the end of testing session. It was also found that the deficiency was not due to impaired visual discrimination, since a reduction in the intensity of the visual stimulus impaired to a similar extent the performance of normal and poorly performing subjects. Equally, no relationship was observed between choice accuracy and the latencies to collect earned food pellets after the correct responses, indicating that motivational factors do not underlie the attention deficit or excessive activity of poorly performers. Furthermore, methylphenidate hydrochloride at doses of 100 and 1000 micrograms/kg slightly improved the attentional performance of poorly performing animals. At the dose 100 micrograms/kg, methylphenidate slightly decreased the probability of premature responses (impulsivity) in these rats, but 1000 micrograms/kg methylphenidate increased the impulsivity of both normal and poorly performing rats. However, methylphenidate did not affect the choice accuracy of normal animals tested at the baseline conditions or with the reduced stimulus duration which impaired their performance. The present data indicate that rats showing poor performance when trained and tested in a 5-choice serial reaction time task may be a model for ADHD.

Animals↗

PubMed1986

Role of monoamine pathways in the control of attention: effects of droperidol and methylphenidate in normal adult humans.

Methylphenidate (0.65 mg/kg), droperidol (15 micrograms/kg) or placebo were administered to normal adult males undertaking a dichotic auditory attention task. Performance following placebo, as measured by the ability of subjects to detect nominated target words and discriminate them from phonemically distracting words, was superior when attention was focused on one ear than when divided between the ears. Following droperidol, target detection and discrimination were reduced for both divided and focused attention and in the latter case responses were also slowed. However, these effects were small compared to the striking withdrawn behaviour of the subjects, who reported an unwillingness to attend to external events. Methylphenidate reversed all of these effects when administered following droperidol. Administered alone, methylphenidate had no effect on dichotic measures of attention but had marked effects on spontaneous behaviour, when most subjects reported a substantial increase in both the field and distractibility of attention. These results are interpreted as implicating central dopaminergic pathways in the regulation of attention without precluding a role for other neurotransmitter systems including ascending noradrenaline and serotonin pathways to cerebral cortex. The disparity between these objective and subjective assessments of the effects of the drugs on attention is discussed in terms of the degree of mental effort voluntarily brought to bear by subjects in the selective allocation of their attentional capacity.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1975

[Measurement of attention deficit in the course of intoxications (author's transl)].

The level and course of attention was measured hourly in 9 drug intoxicated patients after a suicide attempt over periods which varied between 12 and 72 hrs. Attention was measured by the use of two additive 5 step scales for susceptibility to stimulation and reactivity, which were developed by the authors in earlier investigations and proven to be very reliable. Although, the original data set of attention measures was different among the patients, some common features could be elaborated: 1. The level of attention varies very little within 1 hr. Differences greater than one step on the scales were rarely observed between two measurements. 2. The mean course of recovery from attention deficit is linear throughout the scales while the variance is substantial at each step of the scales. For quantification of attention deficit a measure was defined which gives the relation between the actual deficit and full attention. Since the correlation between both scales is high over the whole observation period, it was concluded that the intoxication alters the level but not the structure of attention.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed1976

A component analysis of attentional problems of educationally handicapped boys.

Seventy-three educationally handicapped (EH) and 78 regular class, normally achieving (NA) boys grades 3-8 were tested with a series of measures selected to test three components of attention: coming to attention, decision making, and maintaining attention over time. EH and NA samples were subdivided into three gropus by grade level (grades 3-4, 5-6, and 7-8). Based on a teacher-completed behavioral check list, the EH group was further subdivided according to pupils perceived by teachers as hyperactive or nonhyperactive. With the exception of the youngest group, EH and NA samples did not differ from each other on CA, but regular class boys had slightly higher IQs and better reading scores than did their EH peers; EH hyperactives and EH nonhyperactives differed significantly on reading scores, the difference favoring the nonhyperactives. All pupils were individually administered the Children's Embedded Figures Test (CEFT), the Matching Familiar Figures Test (MFFT), and the Children's Checking Task (CCT), the last designed specifically to assess ability to maintain attention over time. EH pupils did not function as efficiently or as accurately on the attentional tasks as did their normally achieving age peers. Significant differences between EH and NA samples were found for CEFT and MFFT errors, as well as for CCT errors of omission and commission. Analyses of the EH group according to hyperactive--nonhyperactive status were for the most part nonsignificant. Correlational analyses yielded low but statistically significant relationships among the attentional measures, but nonsignificant relationships between IQ and the attentional test scores. Findings were consistent with the interpretation that the three hypothesized components of attention are partially independent and thus may have differential influence on pupils performance in school.

Attention↗

PubMed2004

Explicit knowledge of stimulus-outcome contingencies and stimulus control of selective attention and instrumental action in human smoking behaviour.

RATIONALE: External stimuli (S+) that reliably signal that addictive drugs are available command the focus of selective attention and control instrumental action that procures the drug. According to incentive salience theory, as the contingency between the S+ and the drug is learned the magnitude of attentional orienting towards the S+ increases. By contrast, alternative theories propose that processing of the S+ becomes more efficient with training such that the measured attentional orienting response elicited by the S+ decreases. OBJECTIVES: The aim of the present study was to prompt half of participants to acquire explicit knowledge of the stimulus-reinforcer contingencies arranged in training, to examine the impact of this manipulation on the magnitude of attentional orienting towards the S+. METHODS: Smokers (n=32) completed an instrumental discrimination training procedure in which a set of stimuli were established as differential predictors that an instrumental response would yield tobacco-smoke reinforcement. During training, attention for the stimuli and performance of the instrumental tobacco-seeking response were measured in parallel. One group (n=16) was prompted to develop explicit knowledge of the discriminative contingencies in training whereas another group (n=16) underwent discrimination training without prompting. RESULTS: The prompted group reported accurate knowledge of the contingencies and showed no attentional orienting response towards the S+. By contrast, the unprompted group reported inaccurate knowledge of the contingencies and showed an attentional orienting response towards the S+. The S+ appeared to control the instrumental tobacco-seeking response in both groups equally. CONCLUSIONS: The results suggest that attention for drug paired S+ is associated with the process of learning about the relationship between those cues and the drug.

Attention↗

PubMed1998

Behavioral approaches to the assessment of attention in animals.

Increasing awareness that disorders of attention may underlie cognitive dysfunctions associated with intoxication and neurodegenerative disease has stimulated research into the neural bases of attention. Because attention comprises a constellation of hypothetical cognitive processes, it can only be inferred from behavior, of either human or non-human subjects, under appropriate experimental conditions. Many behavioral procedures have been proposed for modeling attention in animals, but not all of these procedures have been systematically associated with specific attentional processes. This review endeavors to evaluate critically the construct validity of these procedures (i.e., to determine the degree to which a given procedure assesses a particular process) and to suggest experiments to improve the conceptual links between these procedures and the processes they purport to assess. Five categories of processes have been identified from the animal literature: orienting, expectancy, stimulus differentiation (including stimulus salience, discrimination of a critical stimulus from its context, and selection among stimuli), sustained attention, and parallel processing. The review discusses the strengths and weaknesses of specific behavioral procedures for assessing these categories of attentional processes and, given the conceptual uncertainties involved, it attempts to summarize the present state of knowledge of the pharmacology and neurobiology of attention.

Animals↗

PubMed2001

Attentional bias associated with alcohol cues: differences between heavy and occasional social drinkers.

RATIONALE: Previous research has shown an attentional bias toward drug-related stimuli in opiate addicts and toward emotionally threatening words in anxiety patients. OBJECTIVE: The primary aim of this study was to investigate whether non-dependent heavy social drinkers would differ in their selective attention towards alcohol-related stimuli in comparison with a group of occasional social drinkers. METHODS: Attentional bias was assessed using alcohol-related pictures and words in a dot probe detection task. Picture and word pairs were visually presented, followed by a dot probe that replaced one of the items. Attentional bias was determined from latencies in responding to the dot probe. Questionnaires were used to examine the relationships among attention, outcome expectancies after alcohol consumption, and personality traits. Higher-order executive function was also measured with two cognitive tasks, recognition memory and attentional shift. RESULTS: The heavy social drinkers showed an attentional bias towards the alcohol-related stimuli when compared to the occasional social drinkers. The heavy social drinkers also scored more highly on expectancy factors of sociability and sexuality and lower on the personality traits of self-directedness and persistence. CONCLUSION: The results support cognitive theories of addictive behaviour in which the ability of drug-related stimuli to capture attention is suggested to play a part in drug dependence, craving and relapse.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2002

Electrical microstimulation of primate posterior parietal cortex initiates orienting and alerting components of covert attention.

The posterior parietal cortex (PPC) is implicated in the control of visuospatial orienting, including both overt saccadic eye movements and covert shifts of attention (i.e., attention to a location other than at visual fixation). Some studies have suggested that the attentional system is part of the premotor processing in the brain, while others suggest they are separate. Here, we test how the PPC controls covert attention shifts in the absence of executed eye movements. Electrical microstimulation was applied to the right PPC while monkeys performed a spatial, cued target detection task, in which they were not allowed to move their gaze. At high currents, contralateral saccades were evoked. With currents below the thresholds for eliciting saccades, microstimulation produced a purely attentional shift (as indexed by decreased target reaction time) when a cue and target were presented in the contralateral visual field. This suggests that microstimulation can move attention specifically in the absence of any overt movements of the eyes or limbs. In addition, there was a reduction in reaction times in trials that did not evoke attentional orienting, suggesting a more general alerting effect of microstimulation These data provide direct evidence that the PPC may be a source of both attentional modulation of neuronal responses and saccadic eye movements to peripheral visual stimuli.

Animals↗

PubMed2005

Sustained attention in traumatic brain injury (TBI) and healthy controls: enhanced sensitivity with dual-task load.

Poor sustained attention or alertness is a common consequence of traumatic brain injury (TBI) and has a considerable impact on the recovery and adjustment of TBI patients. Here, we describe the development of a sensitive laboratory task in healthy subjects (Experiment 1) and its enhanced sensitivity to sustained attention errors in TBI patients (Experiment 2). The task involves withholding a key press to an infrequent no-go target embedded within a predictable sequence of numbers (primary goal) and detecting grey-coloured targets within the sequence (secondary goal). In Experiment 1, we report that neurologically healthy subjects are more likely to experience a lapse of attention and neglect the primary task goal, despite ceiling performance on the secondary task. Further, attentional lapses on the task correlated with everyday attentional failures and variability of response time. In Experiment 2, the task discriminates between TBI patients and controls with a large effect size. The dual-task yields more errors in both groups than a simple task involving only the primary goal that is commonly used to detect sustained attention deficits in neurologically impaired groups. TBI patients' errors also correlated with everyday cognitive failures and variability of response time. This was not the case in the simple version of the task. We conclude that the dual-task demand associated with this task enhances its sensitivity as a measure of sustained attention in TBI patients and neurologically healthy controls that relates to everyday slips of attention.

Adult↗

PubMed2001

Spatial deployment of attention within and across hemifields in an auditory task.

Research on visual attention has demonstrated that covert attention can be focused on particular locations within one hemifield, but that a specific "meridian" cost may also be found for shifting attention between hemifields. These issues have received less consideration for audition, even though reliable behavioral measures for the effects of spatial attention on hearing are now available. We examined the spatial distribution of covert attention in an auditory task following spatially non-predictive peripheral auditory cues (which should induce exogenous attention shifts), or following symbolic central cues that predicted the likely location for the auditory target (to induce endogenous attention shifts). In both cases, we found that attention can be focused not only on one hemifield versus another, but also within one hemifield in an auditory task. However, there was no unequivocal evidence for a meridian effect in audition.

Adult↗

PubMed1999

Reactivity and event-related potentials during attentional tests in athletes.

A series of attentional tests involving reaction times (RTs) was administered to 12 high-level young (age 17-18 years) volleyball players. During the tests, event-related potentials were recorded by electroencephalogram. In a simple reaction-time test (SRT), the subjects had to respond to a letter that appeared on a white screen. Other tests (attentional shifting tests) consisted of a go/no-go reaction time and a choice reaction time (CRT), divided into a short-latency CRT and a long-latency CRT. In the pre-stimulus period of these tests, there is a shift from broad attention to selective attention, represented by a crowding of black points on the computer screen, followed by the appearance of a letter in the centre of the crowding. The results show that RT increased from SRT to CRT. In the attentional shifting tests, averaged waves of event-related potentials showed a contingent-negative-variation-like wave that was closely related to selective attention (selective attention wave, SAW) before the onset of the stimulus. After the stimulus, a P3 complex was recorded. Correlations were found between the SAW amplitude and P3 latency and amplitude, and between these parameters and RT and its variability. Higher SAW and P3 amplitudes were accompanied by a shorter RT and a lower variability. The characteristics and the correlations that exist between the various parameters are consistent with a possible use of these tests in the analysis of the attentional styles of athletes, and in the evaluation of their progress with training.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2006

Laterally focused attention modulates asymmetric coupling in rhythmic interlimb coordination.

Peters (J Motor Behav 21:151-155, 1989; Interlimb coordination: neural, dynamical and cognitive constraints, Academic, Orlando, pp 595-615, 1994) suggested that expressions of handedness in bimanual coordination may be reflections of an inherent attentional bias. Indeed, previous results indicated that focusing attention on one of the limbs affected the relative phasing between the limbs in a manner comparable to the effects of hand dominance. The present study extended the comparison between the effects of attentional focus and handedness by testing their impact on the interactions between the limbs. Both left-handed and right-handed participants performed rhythmic bimanual coordination tasks (in-phase and antiphase coordination), while directing attention to either limb. Using brief mechanical perturbations, the degree to which the limbs were influenced by each other was determined. The results revealed that the non-dominant limb was more strongly affected by the dominant limb than vice versa and that, in line with Peters' proposition, this handedness-related asymmetry in coupling strength was reduced when attention was focused on the non-dominant limb, thereby highlighting the potential relation between inherent (handedness-related) asymmetries and voluntary attentional asymmetries. In contrast to previous findings, the (commonly observed) phase lead of the dominant limb was attenuated (rather than accrued) when attention was focused on this limb. This unexpected result was explained in terms of the observed attention-related difference in amplitude between the limbs.

Adult↗

PubMed1999

Attention in closed head injury: a critical review.

Closed head injury (CHI) is one of the commonest causes of physical disability and cognitive impairment in young people. In patients with CHI both in the acute and sub-acute phases it is possible to demonstrate a disturbance of cognitive functions that affects their performance in a wide variety of neuropsychological tasks. The most frequent deficits pertain to attention and memory. In reviewing the literature on attention in CHI patients it appears that a debate is still alive about how to interpret the cognitive attentional defect, i. e. whether it is due to a slowing of information processing, to a deficit of 'executive' frontal functions, to a reduction of arousal level, to deficits of selective or divided attention, or to a combination of factors. After a brief general explanation of the neuropsychological cognitive models of attention, an overview of the various studies on attention in CHI will be provided. For the purposes of the review, the studies are grouped according to the different theoretical interpretations in the literature concerning the nature of attentional deficits in CHI patients. Finally, a tentative general interpretation of attentional deficits in CHI, in light of the anatomo-pathological aspects of the brain of CHI patients and of some methodological considerations, is offered.

Arousal↗

PubMed1981

The effects of frontal cortex lesions on event-related potentials during auditory selective attention.

We compared electrophysiological indices of auditory selective attention in control subjects and in patients with unilateral lesions of the dorsolateral frontal lobes. In control subjects, ERPs following attended tones showed an enhanced negativity from 80 to 500 msec post-stimulus which had a different topographic distribution than the N120. Lesions of the frontal lobes reduced the attention-related negativity and impaired behavioral performance. The ERP reductions were equivalent in recordings obtained from electrodes placed over the damaged and intact cortex. A difference was noted between left and right frontal groups as a function of ear of delivery of the stimuli. Patients with left frontal lesions showed reduced attention effects following tones presented to either ear. Patients with right frontal lesions showed intact attention effects to right ear tones, but no attention-related negativity to left ear tones. When the left and right frontal groups were considered together, tones in ignored channels produced larger responses when presented to the ear contralateral to damaged cortex. These results underline the important role of the frontal lobes in processes of selective attention. Although the endogenous negativity produced in selective attention tasks does not appear to originate in dorsolateral frontal cortex, the frontal lobes exhibit a modulating influence upon it. In addition, the endogenous attention related negativity and exogenous N120 components apparently arise from different neural generators.

Adult↗

PubMed1982

The effectiveness of attention and rejection as coping styles: a meta-analysis of temporal differences.

The purpose of this study was to conduct a meta-analysis [16] of research comparing the effects on physical adaptation of two cognitive strategies for coping with stressors: attention and rejection. Attention refers to focusing attention on the stressor and/or on one's rejection to it; rejection refers to focusing attention away from the stressor and/or one's reaction to it. For studies examining the immediate effects of attention and rejection, rejection produced better physical adaptation (i.e. fewer symptoms, reduced physiological responses) than attention. For studies looking at the long term effects of attention and rejection, attention produced better physical adaptation than rejection. Mechanisms which could produce these effects, and their implications, are discussed.

Adaptation, Physiological↗