Do left and right asymmetries of hemispheric preference interact with attention to predict local and global performance in applied tasks?

Many cognitive neuroscience studies show that the ability to attend to and identify global or local information is lateralised between the two hemispheres in the human brain; the left hemisphere is biased towards the local level, whereas the right hemisphere is biased towards the global level. Results of two studies show attention-focused people with a right ear preference (biased towards the left hemisphere) are better at local tasks, whereas people with a left ear preference (biased towards the right hemisphere) are better at more global tasks. In a third study we determined if right hemisphere-biased followers who attend to global stimuli are likely to have a stronger relationship between attention and globally based supervisor ratings of performance. Results provide evidence in support of this hypothesis. Our research supports our model and suggests that the interaction between attention and lateral preference is an important and novel predictor of work-related outcomes. © 2012 Copyright Psychology Press Ltd.

Professional standards research:job satisfaction and innovation

Job satisfaction is a significant predictor of organisational innovation – especially where employees (including shop-floor workers) experience variety in their jobs and work in a single-status environment. The relationship between job satisfaction and performance has long intrigued work psychologists. The idea that "happy workers are productive workers" underpins many theories of performance, leadership, reward and job design. But contrary to popular belief, the relationship between job satisfaction and performance at individual level has been shown to be relatively weak. Research investigating the link between job satisfaction and creativity (the antecedent to innovation) shows that job dissatisfaction promotes creative outcomes. The logic is that those who are dissatisfied (and have decided to stay with the organisation) are determined to change things and have little to lose in doing so (see JM George & J Zhou, 2002). We were therefore surprised to find in the course of our own research into managerial practices and employee attitudes in manufacturing organisations that job satisfaction was a highly significant predictor of product and technological innovation. These results held even though the research was conducted longitudinally, over two years, while controlling for prior innovation. In other words, job satisfaction was a stronger predictor of innovation than any pre-existing orientation organisations had towards working innovatively. Using prior innovation as a control variable, as well as a longitudinal research design, strengthened our case against the argument that people are satisfied because they belong to a highly innovative organisation. We found that the relationship between job satisfaction and innovation was stronger still where organisations showed that they were committed to promoting job variety, especially at shop-floor level. We developed precise instruments to measure innovation, taking into account the magnitude of the innovation both in terms of the number of people involved in its implementation, and how new and different it was. Using this instrument, we are able to give each organisation in our sample a "score" from one to seven for innovation in areas ranging from administration to production technology. We found that much innovation is incremental, involving relatively minor improvements, rather than major change. To achieve sustained innovation, organisations have to draw on the skills and knowledge of employees at all levels. We also measured job satisfaction at organisational level, constructing a mean "job satisfaction" score for all organisations in our sample, and drawing only on those companies whose employees tended to respond in a similar manner to the questions they were asked. We argue that where most of the workforce experience job satisfaction, employees are more likely to collaborate, to share ideas and aim for high standards because people are keen to sustain their positive feelings. Job variety and single-status arrangements further strengthen the relationship between satisfaction and performance. This makes sense; where employees experience variety, they are exposed to new and different ideas and, provided they feel positive about their jobs, are likely to be willing to try to apply these ideas to improve their jobs. Similarly, staff working in single-status environments where hierarchical barriers are reduced are likely to feel trusted and valued by management and there is evidence (see G Jones & J George, 1998) that people work collaboratively and constructively with those they trust. Our study suggests that there is a strong business case for promoting employee job satisfaction. Managers and HR practitioners need to ensure their strategies and practices support and sustain job satisfaction among their workforces to encourage constructive, collaborative and creative working. It is more important than ever for organisations to respond rapidly to demands of the external environment. This study shows the positive association between organisational-level job satisfaction and innovation. So if a happy workforce is the key to unlocking innovation and organisations want to thrive in the global economy, it is vital that managers and HR practitioners pay close attention to employee perceptions of the work environment. In a world where the most innovative survive it could make all the difference.

Reduced attentional capacity, but normal processing speed and shifting of attention in developmental dyslexia: evidence from a serial task

We report the performance of a group of adult dyslexics and matched controls in an array-matching task where two strings of either consonants or symbols are presented side by side and have to be judged to be the same or different. The arrays may differ either in the order or identity of two adjacent characters. This task does not require naming – which has been argued to be the cause of dyslexics’ difficulty in processing visual arrays – but, instead, has a strong serial component as demonstrated by the fact that, in both groups, Reaction times (RTs) increase monotonically with position of a mismatch. The dyslexics are clearly impaired in all conditions and performance in the identity conditions predicts performance across orthographic tasks even after age, performance IQ and phonology are partialled out. Moreover, the shapes of serial position curves are revealing of the underlying impairment. In the dyslexics, RTs increase with position at the same rate as in the controls (lines are parallel) ruling out reduced processing speed or difficulties in shifting attention. Instead, error rates show a catastrophic increase for positions which are either searched later or more subject to interference. These results are consistent with a reduction in the attentional capacity needed in a serial task to bind together identity and positional information. This capacity is best seen as a reduction in the number of spotlights into which attention can be split to process information at different locations rather than as a more generic reduction of resources which would also affect processing the details of single objects.

Self-sustained clusters and ergodicity breaking in spin models

Self-sustained spin clusters are analytically linked to ergodicity breaking in fully connected Ising and Sherrington-Kirkpatick (SK) models, relating the less understood spin space to the well understood state space. This correspondence is established through the absence of clusters in the paramagnetic phase, the presence of one dominant cluster in the Ising ferromagnet, and the formation of nontrivial clusters in SK spin glass. Yet unobserved phenomena are also revealed such as a first order phase transition in cluster sizes in the SK ferromagnet. The method could be adapted to investigate other spin models. © 2013 American Physical Society.

Ageing factor:a potential altmetric for observing events and attention spans in microblogs

We present an initial examination of the (alt)metric ageing factor to study posts in Twitter. Ageing factor was used to characterize a sample of tweets, which contained a variety of astronomical terms. It was found that ageing factor can detect topics that both cause people to retweet faster than baseline values, and topics that hold people’s attention for longer than baseline values.

Deficient inhibition of return in subclinical OCD only when attention is directed to the threatening aspects of a stimulus

Background - Inhibition of return (IOR) is thought to reflect inhibition of previously attended but irrelevant stimuli. Deficient IOR would increase the likelihood of revisiting previously searched locations or objects, thus leading to unproductive perseverations. Method - Therefore, using a novel IOR task, we investigated whether high scoring checkers attentional biases to threat would result in dysfunctional inhibitory functioning compared to low checkers. In two tasks, we compared 53 subclinical high and 49 low checkers regarding IOR effects for stimuli that were concordant with the concerns of high but not of low checkers (electrical kitchen appliances: e.g., toaster, kettle). The difference between the two tasks was the cueing procedure. In one task, an appliance was switched “ON” and “OFF” as an unpredictive cue, drawing attention to the functionality of the stimulus. Results - In this task, IOR was specifically attenuated in high checkers. In the other task, however, the cue was more abstract in form of a yellow outline that appeared around one of two appliances. Although the appliance was either “ON” or “OFF,” this did not seem to matter and high checkers revealed a typical IOR pattern similar to low checkers. Conclusions - We conclude that IOR mechanisms might not be generally deficient in high checkers; rather only when attention is drawn to the threatening aspects of ecologically valid stimuli, then disengagement of attention is deficient in high checkers. We make suggestions on how our task-specific findings may inform cognitive interventions that target attentional control in the treatment of checking/obsessive–compulsive disorder.

Control of environmental lead pollution with particular attention to lead in food

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Timeline generation with social attention

Timeline generation is an important research task which can help users to have a quick understanding of the overall evolution of any given topic. It thus attracts much attention from research communities in recent years. Nevertheless, existing work on timeline generation often ignores an important factor, the attention attracted to topics of interest (hereafter termed "social attention"). Without taking into consideration social attention, the generated timelines may not reflect users' collective interests. In this paper, we study how to incorporate social attention in the generation of timeline summaries. In particular, for a given topic, we capture social attention by learning users' collective interests in the form of word distributions from Twitter, which are subsequently incorporated into a unified framework for timeline summary generation. We construct four evaluation sets over six diverse topics. We demonstrate that our proposed approach is able to generate both informative and interesting timelines. Our work sheds light on the feasibility of incorporating social attention into traditional text mining tasks. Copyright © 2013 ACM.

Clinical performance of daily disposable soft contact lenses using sustained release technology

Purpose: Polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) is a successful tear film stabiliser and is widely used in comfort drops and some soft contact lens materials. A PVA-containing lens, nelfilcon A has been modified to include additional (non-functional) PVA in order to provide improved comfort. This study aims to examine the clinical performance of this nelfilcon A lens with AquaRelease™ (AquaRelease). Methods: Two contralateral, investigator masked, open label, subjective and objective evaluations were conducted. The first examined the effect of adding increased molecular weight PVA to nelfilcon A (n = 5), and the second compared this AquaRelease lens to ocufilcon B (n = 34). The principal measures were non-invasive break-up time (NIBUT) and subjective comfort, which were assessed at the beginning and end of a week of daily wear, and three times throughout 1 day at 8, 12 and 16 h. Results: All subjects successfully completed the daily wearing schedule of 16 h. On initial insertion, subjective comfort and NIBUT improved for AquaRelease than original nelfilcon A lenses (p < 0.05). Initial comfort was better for AquaRelease compared to ocufilcon B lenses (p = 0.01); however, NIBUT was not statistically different (11.7 ± 15.6 s versus 8.4 ± 6.8 s; p = 0.26). Subjective comfort decreased with time (p < 0.001), but there was no significant difference between AquaRelease and ocufilcon B lenses (p = 0.16). NIBUT was not significantly affected by time (p = 0.56) or between lenses (p = 0.33). At the end of a weeks' wear, subjective initial, end-of-day, overall comfort and vision were rated significantly better with AquaRelease than ocufilcon B (p < 0.01). Conclusions: Release of additional non-functionalised PVA from the nelfilcon A lenses appears to enhance comfortable contact lens wear. © 2006 British Contact Lens Association.

Investigating evoked and induced electroencephalogram activity in task-related alpha power increases during an internally directed attention task

This study sought to explore whether the so-called 'paradoxical' task-related increases in the alpha bandwidth of the human electroencephalogram result from increases in evoked (phase locked), as opposed to induced (non-phase locked), activity. The electroencephalograms of 18 participants were recorded while they engaged in both auditory sensory-intake tasks (listening to randomly generated 'tunes') and internally directed attention tasks (imagining the same randomly generated tunes) matched for auditory input. Measures of evoked (phase locked) and induced (non-phase locked) activity were compared between tasks. Increases in induced alpha power were found during internal attention. No experimental effects were observed for evoked activity. These results are not entirely consistent with proposals that 'paradoxical' alpha indexes the evoked inhibition of task irrelevant processing.

Cortical mechanisms of attention in time:neural correlates of the Lag-1-sparing phenomenon

If humans monitor streams of rapidly presented (approximately 100-ms intervals) visual stimuli, which are typically specific single letters of the alphabet, for two targets (T1 and T2), they often miss T2 if it follows T1 within an interval of 200-500 ms. If T2 follows T1 directly (within 100 ms; described as occurring at 'Lag 1'), however, performance is often excellent: the so-called 'Lag-1 sparing' phenomenon. Lag-1 sparing might result from the integration of the two targets into the same 'event representation', which fits with the observation that sparing is often accompanied by a loss of T1-T2 order information. Alternatively, this might point to competition between the two targets (implying a trade-off between performance on T1 and T2) and Lag-1 sparing might solely emerge from conditional data analysis (i.e. T2 performance given T1 correct). We investigated the neural correlates of Lag-1 sparing by carrying out magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings during an attentional blink (AB) task, by presenting two targets with a temporal lag of either 1 or 2 and, in the case of Lag 2, with a nontarget or a blank intervening between T1 and T2. In contrast to Lag 2, where two distinct neural responses were observed, at Lag 1 the two targets produced one common neural response in the left temporo-parieto-frontal (TPF) area but not in the right TPF or prefrontal areas. We discuss the implications of this result with respect to competition and integration hypotheses, and with respect to the different functional roles of the cortical areas considered. We suggest that more than one target can be identified in parallel in left TPF, at least in the absence of intervening nontarget information (i.e. masks), yet identified targets are processed and consolidated as two separate events by other cortical areas (right TPF and PFC, respectively).

Modulation of long-range neural synchrony reflects temporal limitations of visual attention in humans

Because of attentional limitations, the human visual system can process for awareness and response only a fraction of the input received. Lesion and functional imaging studies have identified frontal, temporal, and parietal areas as playing a major role in the attentional control of visual processing, but very little is known about how these areas interact to form a dynamic attentional network. We hypothesized that the network communicates by means of neural phase synchronization, and we used magnetoencephalography to study transient long-range interarea phase coupling in a well studied attentionally taxing dual-target task (attentional blink). Our results reveal that communication within the fronto-parieto-temporal attentional network proceeds via transient long-range phase synchronization in the beta band. Changes in synchronization reflect changes in the attentional demands of the task and are directly related to behavioral performance. Thus, we show how attentional limitations arise from the way in which the subsystems of the attentional network interact. The human brain faces an inestimable task of reducing a potentially overloading amount of input into a manageable flow of information that reflects both the current needs of the organism and the external demands placed on it. This task is accomplished via a ubiquitous construct known as “attention,” whose mechanism, although well characterized behaviorally, is far from understood at the neurophysiological level. Whereas attempts to identify particular neural structures involved in the operation of attention have met with considerable success (1-5) and have resulted in the identification of frontal, parietal, and temporal regions, far less is known about the interaction among these structures in a way that can account for the task-dependent successes and failures of attention. The goal of the present research was, thus, to unravel the means by which the subsystems making up the human attentional network communicate and to relate the temporal dynamics of their communication to observed attentional limitations in humans. A prime candidate for communication among distributed systems in the human brain is neural synchronization (for review, see ref. 6). Indeed, a number of studies provide converging evidence that long-range interarea communication is related to synchronized oscillatory activity (refs. 7-14; for review, see ref. 15). To determine whether neural synchronization plays a role in attentional control, we placed humans in an attentionally demanding task and used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to track interarea communication by means of neural synchronization. In particular, we presented 10 healthy subjects with two visual target letters embedded in streams of 13 distractor letters, appearing at a rate of seven per second. The targets were separated in time by a single distractor. This condition leads to the “attentional blink” (AB), a well studied dual-task phenomenon showing the reduced ability to report the second of two targets when an interval <500 ms separates them (16-18). Importantly, the AB does not prevent perceptual processing of missed target stimuli but only their conscious report (19), demonstrating the attentional nature of this effect and making it a good candidate for the purpose of our investigation. Although numerous studies have investigated factors, e.g., stimulus and timing parameters, that manipulate the magnitude of a particular AB outcome, few have sought to characterize the neural state under which “standard” AB parameters produce an inability to report the second target on some trials but not others. We hypothesized that the different attentional states leading to different behavioral outcomes (second target reported correctly or not) are characterized by specific patterns of transient long-range synchronization between brain areas involved in target processing. Showing the hypothesized correspondence between states of neural synchronization and human behavior in an attentional task entails two demonstrations. First, it needs to be demonstrated that cortical areas that are suspected to be involved in visual-attention tasks, and the AB in particular, interact by means of neural synchronization. This demonstration is particularly important because previous brain-imaging studies (e.g., ref. 5) only showed that the respective areas are active within a rather large time window in the same task and not that they are concurrently active and actually create an interactive network. Second, it needs to be demonstrated that the pattern of neural synchronization is sensitive to the behavioral outcome; specifically, the ability to correctly identify the second of two rapidly succeeding visual targets

Sensory processing, reading, IQ, and attention

Detection thresholds for two visual- and two auditory-processing tasks were obtained for 73 children and young adults who varied broadly in reading ability. A reading-disabled subgroup had significantly higher thresholds than a normal-reading subgroup for the auditory tasks only. When analyzed across the whole group, the auditory tasks and one of the visual tasks, coherent motion detection, were significantly related to word reading. These effects were largely independent of ADHD ratings; however, none of these measures accounted for significant variance in word reading after controlling for full-scale IQ. In contrast, phoneme awareness, rapid naming, and nonword repetition each explained substantial, significant word reading variance after controlling for IQ, suggesting more specific roles for these oral language skills in the development of word reading. © 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The use of antidepressants to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in adults

There is increasing evidence that children continue to experience attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms into adult life. The two main treatments for ADHD are antidepressants and stimulants. Here, the effectiveness data relating to the use of antidepressants in adults with ADHD are reviewed. Four controlled and six open studies were identified. Although, there is only limited data currently available, antidepressants may offer an effective therapy for adult ADHD. Controlled trials have studied desipramine, atomoxetine and bupropion, with most evidence supporting the efficacy of desipramine. The initial data indicate that atomoxetine is less effective than desipramine. The efficacy of bupropion is unclear. Initial published open data suggest a response rate of 50-78% with venlafaxine. Controlled studies are required to confirm this efficacy. Most of the present data are short-term, therefore long-term effectiveness data are required.