Impact of active and latent concerns about COVID-19 on attention.

The interactions between emotion and attention are complex due to the multifaceted nature of attention. Adding to this complexity, the COVID-19 pandemic has altered the emotional landscape, broadly heightening health and financial concerns. Can the heightened concerns about COVID-19 impair one or more of the components of attention? To explore the connection between heightened concerns about COVID-19 and attention, in a preregistered study, we collected survey responses from 234 participants assessing levels of concerns surrounding COVID-19, followed by four psychophysics tasks hypothesized to tap into different aspects of attention: visual search, working memory, sustained attention, and cognitive control. We also measured task-unrelated thoughts. Results showed that task-unrelated thoughts, but not survey reports of concern levels, negatively correlated with sustained attention and cognitive control, while visual search and working memory remained robust to task-unrelated thoughts and survey-indicated concern levels. As a whole, these findings suggest that being concerned about COVID-19 does not interfere with cognitive function unless the concerns are active in the form of task-unrelated thoughts.

The Effectiveness of Neurofeedback Therapy on Sustained Attention of Dyslexic Students

This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of neurofeedback therapy on sustained attention of dyslexic students. The research method was quasi-experimental, pretest-posttest with a control group, and 1-month follow-up. The available sample selection method and the sample number of 30 students with dyslexia were selected and randomly divided into experimental and control groups. The experimental group received neurofeedback treatment in 8 sessions once a week. The research instruments used in this study were Karami, Nouri, and Moradi's (2005) reading performance questionnaire and sustained attention to continuous performance test (Rosvold, 1956). The results of repeated measures analysis of variance showed that neurofeedback treatment was effective on sustained attention (P <0.05) .Therefore, it can be concluded that neurofeedback therapy can be used to increase sustained attention in dyslexic children.

Rapid vigilance and episodic memory decrements in COVID-19 survivors.

Recent studies indicate that COVID-19 infection can lead to serious neurological consequences in a small percentage of individuals. However, in the months following acute illness, many more suffer from fatigue, low motivation, disturbed mood, poor sleep and cognitive symptoms, colloquially referred to as 'brain fog'. But what about individuals who had asymptomatic to moderate COVID-19 and reported no concerns after recovering from COVID-19? Here, we examined a wide range of cognitive functions critical for daily life (including sustained attention, memory, motor control, planning, semantic reasoning, mental rotation and spatial-visual attention) in people who had previously suffered from COVID-19 but were not significantly different from a control group on self-reported fatigue, forgetfulness, sleep abnormality, motivation, depression, anxiety and personality profile. Reassuringly, COVID-19 survivors performed well in most abilities tested, including working memory, executive function, planning and mental rotation. However, they displayed significantly worse episodic memory (up to 6 months post-infection) and greater decline in vigilance with time on task (for up to 9 months). Overall, the results show that specific chronic cognitive changes following COVID-19 are evident on objective testing even amongst those who do not report a greater symptom burden. Importantly, in the sample tested here, these were not significantly different from normal after 6-9 months, demonstrating evidence of recovery over time.

Characteristics of sustained attention in continuous performance task (CPT) and its variants

Many activities require us to sustain attention over time. Yet laboratory tasks using the continuous performance task (CPT) show that people are unable to sustain attention over a long time. What mechanisms underlie sustained attention and what factors account for the vigilance decline? Two theories provide different perspectives on these questions. One class, termed "underload" theories, postulates that the simplicity and tedium of continuous performance tasks drive people to withdraw attentional resources from the ongoing task, redirecting resources to task-unrelated thoughts. In contrast, "overload" theories propose that the need to maintain constant focus on a task drains attentional resources. As resources are depleted over time, fewer are available for completing a task, such as maintaining control over motor impulsivity. Bearing in mind these different theoretical perspectives, this dissertation investigates the underlying mechanisms of errors in a novel gradual-onset continuous performance task (gradCPT). Study 1 provided an independent replication of rapid vigilance decline in the gradCPT within three 8-min blocks. This study found that the rapid performance decrement was modulated by high task-required response rate, but not by the repetitive nature of the task stimuli or the low target prevalence. Using a within-subject design, Study 2 confirmed the deleterious effects of high task-required response rate on gradCPT performance. This study showed that, compared with abrupt onset, the gradual onset of images enhanced CPT performance, suggesting that the gradual transition of images attenuated motor impulsivity. Individual differences in the gradCPT correlated with performance on a stop-signal task, suggesting that response inhibition in the gradCPT reflects executive control. Study 3 tested the relationship between CPT performance and health and financial concerns about COVID-19 in the middle of the pandemic. This study showed that the severity of COVID-related concerns did not correlate with CPT performance. However, CPT performance was worse for participants who reported to engage in mind wandering more frequently during the CPT. Taken together, this dissertation provides converging evidence that response inhibition is a significant component of the gradCPT. These findings are consistent with overload theories, which posit that the CPT is attentionally demanding and the demand to control repetitive motor responses drains attentional resources. Some of the findings also provide partial support for the underload theories, which posit that errors in the CPT reflect the allocation of attentional resources towards task-unrelated thoughts. These findings are consistent with the resource control theory, which postulates that executive control is required to suppress task irrelevant thoughts and to control motor impulsivity in the CPT. More empirical evidence is needed to characterize the relationship between executive control and vigilance performance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

When Eyes Wander Around: Mind-Wandering as Revealed by Eye Movement Analysis with Hidden Markov Models.

Mind-wandering has been shown to largely influence our learning efficiency, especially in the digital and distracting era nowadays. Detecting mind-wandering thus becomes imperative in educational scenarios. Here, we used a wearable eye-tracker to record eye movements during the sustained attention to response task. Eye movement analysis with hidden Markov models (EMHMM), which takes both spatial and temporal eye-movement information into account, was used to examine if participants' eye movement patterns can differentiate between the states of focused attention and mind-wandering. Two representative eye movement patterns were discovered through clustering using EMHMM: centralized and distributed patterns. Results showed that participants with the centralized pattern had better performance on detecting targets and rated themselves as more focused than those with the distributed pattern. This study indicates that distinct eye movement patterns are associated with different attentional states (focused attention vs. mind-wandering) and demonstrates a novel approach in using EMHMM to study attention. Moreover, this study provides a potential approach to capture the mind-wandering state in the classroom without interrupting the ongoing learning behavior.

Social Robots for Evaluating Attention State in Older Adults.

Sustained attention is essential for older adults to maintain an active lifestyle, and the deficiency of this function is often associated with health-related risks such as falling and frailty. The present study examined whether the well-established age-effect on reducing mind-wandering, the drift to internal thoughts that are seen to be detrimental to attentional control, could be replicated by using a robotic experimenter for older adults who are not as familiar with online technologies. A total of 28 younger and 22 older adults performed a Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) by answering thought probes regarding their attention states and providing confidence ratings for their own task performances. The indices from the modified SART suggested a well-documented conservative response strategy endorsed by older adults, which were represented by slower responses and increased omission errors. Moreover, the slower responses and increased omissions were found to be associated with less self-reported mind-wandering, thus showing consistency with their higher subjective ratings of attentional control. Overall, this study demonstrates the potential of constructing age-related cognitive profiles with attention evaluation instruction based on a social companion robot for older adults at home.

Do concerns about COVID-19 impair sustained attention?

The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has considerably heightened health and financial concerns for many individuals. Similar concerns, such as those associated with poverty, impair performance on cognitive control tasks. If ongoing concerns about COVID-19 substantially increase the tendency to mind wander in tasks requiring sustained attention, these worries could degrade performance on a wide range of tasks, leading, for example, to increased traffic accidents, diminished educational achievement, and lower workplace productivity. In two pre-registered experiments, we investigated the degree to which young adults' concerns about COVID-19 correlated with their ability to sustain attention. Experiment 1 tested mainly European participants during an early phase of the pandemic. After completing a survey probing COVID-related concerns, participants engaged in a continuous performance task (CPT) over two, 4-min blocks, during which they responded to city scenes that occurred 90% of the time and withheld responses to mountain scenes that occurred 10% of the time. Despite large and stable individual differences, performance on the scene CPT did not significantly correlate with the severity of COVID-related concerns obtained from the survey. Experiment 2 tested US participants during a later phase of the pandemic. Once again, CPT performance did not significantly correlate with COVID concerns expressed in a pre-task survey. However, participants who had more task-unrelated thoughts performed more poorly on the CPT. These findings suggest that although COVID-19 increased anxiety in a broad swath of society, young adults are able to hold these concerns in a latent format, minimizing their impact on performance in a demanding sustained attention task.