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1. Microsaccades reflect the dynamics of misdirected attention in magic

   https://doi.org/10.16910/jemr.12.6.7  

   Barnhart, Anthony S.; Costela, Francisco M.; Martinez-Conde, Susana; Macknik, Stephen L.; Goldinger, Stephen D. (June 2020, Journal of Eye Movement Research)

   The methods of magicians provide powerful tools for enhancing the ecological validity of laboratory studies of attention. The current research borrows a technique from magic to explore the relationship between microsaccades and covert attention under near-natural viewing conditions. We monitored participants’ eye movements as they viewed a magic trick where a coin placed beneath a napkin vanishes and reappears beneath another napkin. Many participants fail to see the coin move from one location to the other the first time around, thanks to the magician’s misdirection. However, previous research was unable to distinguish whether or not participants were fooled based on their eye movements. Here, we set out to determine if microsaccades may provide a window into the efficacy of the magician’s misdirection. In a multi-trial setting, participants monitored the location of the coin (which changed positions in half of the trials), while engaging in a delayed match-to-sample task at a different spatial location. Microsaccades onset times varied with task difficulty, and microsaccade directions indexed the locus of covert attention. Our com-bined results indicate that microsaccades may be a useful metric of covert attentional processes in applied and ecologically valid settings. 

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2. The Medial Temporal Lobe Is Critical for Spatial Relational Perception

   https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_01583  

   Ruiz, Nicholas A.; Meager, Michael R.; Agarwal, Sachin; Aly, Mariam (September 2020, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience)

   The medial temporal lobe (MTL) is traditionally considered to be a system that is specialized for long-term memory. Recent work has challenged this notion by demonstrating that this region can contribute to many domains of cognition beyond long-term memory, including perception and attention. One potential reason why the MTL (and hippocampus specifically) contributes broadly to cognition is that it contains relational representations—representations of multidimensional features of experience and their unique relationship to one another—that are useful in many different cognitive domains. Here, we explore the hypothesis that the hippocampus/MTL plays a critical role in attention and perception via relational representations. We compared human participants with MTL damage to healthy age- and education-matched individuals on attention tasks that varied in relational processing demands. On each trial, participants viewed two images (rooms with paintings). On “similar room” trials, they judged whether the rooms had the same spatial layout from a different perspective. On “similar art” trials, they judged whether the paintings could have been painted by the same artist. On “identical” trials, participants simply had to detect identical paintings or rooms. MTL lesion patients were significantly and selectively impaired on the similar room task. This work provides further evidence that the hippocampus/MTL plays a ubiquitous role in cognition by virtue of its relational and spatial representations and highlights its important contributions to rapid perceptual processes that benefit from attention. 

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3. States of epistemic curiosity interfere with memory for incidental scholastic facts

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-024-00234-w  

   Keller, Nicole E.; Salvi, Carola; Leiker, Emily K.; Gruber, Matthias J.; Dunsmoor, Joseph E. (March 2024, npj Science of Learning)

   Abstract Curiosity can be a powerful motivator to learn and retain new information. Evidence shows that high states of curiosity elicited by a specific source (i.e., a trivia question) can promote memory for incidental stimuli (non-target) presented close in time. The spreading effect of curiosity states on memory for other information has potential for educational applications. Specifically, it could provide techniques to improve learning for information that did not spark a sense of curiosity on its own. Here, we investigated how high states of curiosity induced through trivia questions affect memory performance for unrelated scholastic facts (e.g., scientific, English, or historical facts) presented in close temporal proximity to the trivia question. Across three task versions, participants viewed trivia questions closely followed in time by a scholastic fact unrelated to the trivia question, either just prior to or immediately following the answer to the trivia question. Participants then completed a surprise multiple-choice memory test (akin to a pop quiz) for the scholastic material. In all three task versions, memory performance was poorer for scholastic facts presented after trivia questions that had elicited high versus low levels of curiosity. These results contradict previous findings showing curiosity-enhanced memory for incidentally presented visual stimuli and suggest that target information that generates a high-curiosity state interferes with encoding complex and unrelated scholastic facts presented close in time. 

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4. Dynamic neural reconstructions of attended object location and features using EEG

   https://doi.org/10.1152/jn.00180.2022  

   Chen, Jiageng; Golomb, Julie D. (July 2023, Journal of Neurophysiology)

   Attention allows us to select relevant and ignore irrelevant information from our complex environments. What happens when attention shifts from one item to another? To answer this question, it is critical to have tools that accurately recover neural representations of both feature and location information with high temporal resolution. In the present study, we used human electroencephalography (EEG) and machine learning to explore how neural representations of object features and locations update across dynamic shifts of attention. We demonstrate that EEG can be used to create simultaneous time courses of neural representations of attended features (time point-by-time point inverted encoding model reconstructions) and attended location (time point-by-time point decoding) during both stable periods and across dynamic shifts of attention. Each trial presented two oriented gratings that flickered at the same frequency but had different orientations; participants were cued to attend one of them and on half of trials received a shift cue midtrial. We trained models on a stable period from Hold attention trials and then reconstructed/decoded the attended orientation/location at each time point on Shift attention trials. Our results showed that both feature reconstruction and location decoding dynamically track the shift of attention and that there may be time points during the shifting of attention when 1) feature and location representations become uncoupled and 2) both the previously attended and currently attended orientations are represented with roughly equal strength. The results offer insight into our understanding of attentional shifts, and the noninvasive techniques developed in the present study lend themselves well to a wide variety of future applications. NEW & NOTEWORTHY We used human EEG and machine learning to reconstruct neural response profiles during dynamic shifts of attention. Specifically, we demonstrated that we could simultaneously read out both location and feature information from an attended item in a multistimulus display. Moreover, we examined how that readout evolves over time during the dynamic process of attentional shifts. These results provide insight into our understanding of attention, and this technique carries substantial potential for versatile extensions and applications. 

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5. Visual Distraction Disrupts Category-tuned Attentional Filters in Ventral Visual Cortex

   https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_01870  

   Dube, Blaire; Pidaparthi, Lasyapriya; Golomb, Julie D. (July 2022, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience)

   Abstract Our behavioral goals shape how we process information via attentional filters that prioritize goal-relevant information, dictating both where we attend and what we attend to. When something unexpected or salient appears in the environment, it captures our spatial attention. Extensive research has focused on the spatiotemporal aspects of attentional capture, but what happens to concurrent nonspatial filters during visual distraction? Here, we demonstrate a novel, broader consequence of distraction: widespread disruption to filters that regulate category-specific object processing. We recorded fMRI while participants viewed arrays of face/house hybrid images. On distractor-absent trials, we found robust evidence for the standard signature of category-tuned attentional filtering: greater BOLD activation in fusiform face area during attend-faces blocks and in parahippocampal place area during attend-houses blocks. However, on trials where a salient distractor (white rectangle) flashed abruptly around a nontarget location, not only was spatial attention captured, but the concurrent category-tuned attentional filter was disrupted, revealing a boost in activation for the to-be-ignored category. This disruption was robust, resulting in errant processing—and early on, prioritization—of goal-inconsistent information. These findings provide a direct test of the filter disruption theory: that in addition to disrupting spatial attention, distraction also disrupts nonspatial attentional filters tuned to goal-relevant information. Moreover, these results reveal that, under certain circumstances, the filter disruption may be so profound as to induce a full reversal of the attentional control settings, which carries novel implications for both theory and real-world perception. 

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