There’s that scary picture: attention bias to threatening scenes in Williams syndrome

There is increasing evidence that Williams syndrome (WS) is associated with elevated anxiety that is non-social in nature, including generalised anxiety and fears. To date very little research has examined the cognitive processes associated with this anxiety. In the present research, attentional bias for non-social threatening images in WS was examined using a dot-probe paradigm. Participants were 16 individuals with WS aged between 13 and 34 years and two groups of typically developing controls matched to the WS group on chronological age and attentional control ability respectively. The WS group exhibited a significant attention bias towards threatening images. In contrast, no bias was found for group matched on attentional control and a slight bias away from threat was found in the chronological age matched group. The results are contrasted with recent findings suggesting that individuals with WS do not show an attention bias for threatening faces and discussed in relation to neuroimaging research showing elevated amygdala activation in response to threatening non-social scenes in WS.

I see happy people: attention bias towards happy but not angry facial expressions in Williams syndrome

Introduction: Observations of behaviour and research using eye-tracking technology have shown that individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) pay an unusual amount of attention to other people’s faces. The present research examines whether this attention to faces is moderated by the valence of emotional expression. Method: Sixteen participants with WS aged between 13 and 29 years (Mean=19 years 9 months) completed a dot-probe task in which pairs of faces displaying happy, angry and neutral expressions were presented. The performance of the WS group was compared to two groups of typically developing control participants, individually matched to the participants in the WS group on either chronological age or mental age. General mental age was assessed in the WS group using the Woodcock Johnson Test of Cognitive Ability Revised (WJ-COG-R; Woodcock & Johnson, 1989; 1990). Results: Compared to both control groups, the WS group exhibited a greater attention bias for happy faces. In contrast, no between-group differences in bias for angry faces were obtained. Conclusions: The results are discussed in relation to recent neuroimaging findings and the hypersocial behaviour that is characteristic of the WS population.

Allocation of spatial attention to emotional stimuli depends upon arousal and not valence

Attentional allocation to emotional stimuli is often proposed to be driven by valence and in particular by negativity. However, many negative stimuli are also arousing leaving the question whether valence or arousal accounts for this effect. The authors examined whether the valence or the arousal level of emotional stimuli influences the allocation of spatial attention using a modified spatial cueing task. Participants responded to targets that were preceded by cues consisting of emotional pictures varying on arousal and valence. Response latencies showed that disengagement of spatial attention was slower for stimuli high in arousal than for stimuli low in arousal. The effect was independent of the valence of the pictures and not gender-specific. The findings support the idea that arousal affects the allocation of attention.

Attempts to control pain prioritize attention to signals of pain: an experimental study

Clinical evidence suggests that a persistent search for solutions for chronic pain may bring along costs at the cognitive, affective, and behavioral level. Specifically, attempts to control pain may fuel hypervigilance and prioritize attention towards pain-related information. This hypothesis was investigated in an experiment with 41 healthy volunteers. Prioritization of attention towards a signal for pain was measured using an adaptation of a visual search paradigm in which participants had to search for a target presented in a varying number of colored circles. One of these colors (Conditioned Stimulus) became a signal for pain (Unconditioned Stimulus: electrocutaneous stimulus at tolerance level) using a classical conditioning procedure. Intermixed with the visual search task, participants also performed another task. In the pain-control group, participants were informed that correct and fast responses on trials of this second task would result in an avoidance of the Unconditioned Stimulus. In the comparison group, performance on the second task was not instrumental in controlling pain. Results showed that in the pain-control group, attention was more prioritized towards the Conditioned Stimulus than in the comparison group. The theoretical and clinical implications of these results are discussed.

Visual attention and attribute attendance in multi-attribute choice experiments

Decision strategies in multi-attribute Choice Experiments are investigated using eye-tracking. The visual attention towards, and attendance of, attributes is examined. Stated attendance is found to diverge substantively from visual attendance of attributes. However, stated and visual attendance are shown to be informative, non-overlapping sources of information about respondent utility functions when incorporated into model estimation. Eye-tracking also reveals systematic nonattendance of attributes only by a minority of respondents. Most respondents visually attend most attributes most of the time. We find no compelling evidence that the level of attention is related to respondent certainty, or that higher or lower value attributes receive more or less attention

Do professional forecasters pay attention to data releases?

We present a novel approach to assessing the attentiveness of professional forecasters to news about the macroeconomy. We find evidence that professional forecasters, taken as a group, do not always update their estimates of the current state of the economy to reflect the latest releases of revised estimates of key data.

Promoting mother–infant book sharing and infant attention and language development in an impoverished South African population: a pilot study

The low rates of child literacy in South Africa are cause for considerable concern. Research from the developed world shows that parental sharing of picture books with infants and young children is beneficial for child language and cognitive development, as well as literacy skills. We conducted a pilot study to examine whether such benefits might extend to an impoverished community in South Africa, by evaluating the impact of training mothers in book sharing with their 14–18 month old infants. Seventeen mothers received book sharing training; and 13 mothers did not, but instead received a comparison training in toy play. We assessed the mothers’ behavior during both book sharing and toy play before and after training, and we also assessed infant attention and language. Mothers receiving book sharing training engaged well with it, and they also benefited from it; thus, compared to the comparison group mothers, they became more sensitive, more facilitating, and more elaborative with their infants during book sharing, and they also became more sensitive to their infants during toy play. In addition, infants whose mothers received the book sharing training showed greater benefits than the comparison group infants in both their attention and language. Training in book sharing for families living in conditions of marked socio-economic adversity in South Africa has the potential to be of considerable benefit to child developmental progress. A large scale controlled trial is required to confirm this.

Disorder-specific functional abnormalities during temporal discounting in youth with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Autism and comorbid ADHD and Autism

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are often comorbid and share cognitive abnormalities in temporal foresight. A key question is whether shared cognitive phenotypes are based on common or different underlying pathophysiologies and whether comorbid patients have additive neurofunctional deficits, resemble one of the disorders or have a different pathophysiology. We compared age- and IQ-matched boys with non-comorbid ADHD (18), non-comorbid ASD (15), comorbid ADHD and ASD (13) and healthy controls (18) using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during a temporal discounting task. Only the ASD and the comorbid groups discounted delayed rewards more steeply. The fMRI data showed both shared and disorder-specific abnormalities in the three groups relative to controls in their brain-behaviour associations. The comorbid group showed both unique and more severe brain-discounting associations than controls and the non-comorbid patient groups in temporal discounting areas of ventromedial and lateral prefrontal cortex, ventral striatum and anterior cingulate, suggesting that comorbidity is neither an endophenocopy of the two pure disorders nor an additive pathology.

Abnormal functional activation and maturation of fronto-striato-temporal and cerebellar regions during sustained attention in autism spectrum disorder

Objective Sustained attention problems are common in people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and may have significant implications for the diagnosis and management of ASD and associated comorbidities. Furthermore, ASD has been associated with atypical structural brain development. The authors used functional MRI to investigate the functional brain maturation of attention between childhood and adulthood in people with ASD. Method Using a parametrically modulated sustained attention/vigilance task, the authors examined brain activation and its linear correlation with age between childhood and adulthood in 46 healthy male adolescents and adults (ages 11–35 years) with ASD and 44 age- and IQ-matched typically developing comparison subjects. Results Relative to the comparison group, the ASD group had significantly poorer task performance and significantly lower activation in inferior prefrontal cortical, medial prefrontal cortical, striato-thalamic, and lateral cerebellar regions. A conjunction analysis of this analysis with group differences in brain-age correlations showed that the comparison group, but not the ASD group, had significantly progressively increased activation with age in these regions between childhood and adulthood, suggesting abnormal functional brain maturation in ASD. Several regions that showed both abnormal activation and functional maturation were associated with poorer task performance and clinical measures of ASD and inattention. Conclusions The results provide first evidence that abnormalities in sustained attention networks in individuals with ASD are associated with underlying abnormalities in the functional brain maturation of these networks between late childhood and adulthood.

Emotion regulation meets emotional attention: the influence of emotion suppression on emotional attention depends on the nature of the distracters

Recent evidence has suggested a crucial role of people’s current goals in attention to emotional information. This asks for research investigating how and what kinds of goals shape emotional attention. The present study investigated how the goal to suppress a negative emotional state influences attention to emotion-congruent events. After inducing disgust, we instructed participants to suppress all feelings of disgust during a subsequent dot probe task. Attention to disgusting images was modulated by the sort of distracter that was presented in parallel with disgusting imagery. When disgusting images were presented together with neutral images, emotion suppression was accompanied by a tendency to attend to disgusting images. However, when disgusting images were shown with positive images that allow coping with disgust (i.e., images representing cleanliness), attention tended away from disgusting images and toward images representing cleanliness. These findings show that emotion suppression influences the allocation of attention but that the successful avoidance of emotion-congruent events depends on the availability of effective distracters.

On the flexibility of attention to race

Research on the flexibility of race-based processing offers divergent results. Some studies find that race affects processing in an obligatory fashion. Other studies suggest dramatic flexibility. The current study attempts to clarify this divergence by examining a process that may mediate flexibility in race-based processing: the engagement of visual attention. In this study, White participants completed an exogenous cuing task designed to measure attention to White and Black faces. Participants in the control condition showed a pronounced bias to attend to Black faces. Critically, participants in a goal condition were asked to process a feature of the stimulus that was unrelated to race. The induction of this goal eliminated differential attention to Black faces, suggesting that attentional engagement responds flexibly to top-down goals, rather than obligatorily to bottom-up racial cues.

The principles underlying the use of powder diffraction data in solving pharmaceutical crystal structures

Solving pharmaceutical crystal structures from powder diffraction data is discussed in terms of the methodologies that have been applied and the complexity of the structures that have been solved. The principles underlying these methodologies are summarized and representative examples of polymorph, solvate, salt and cocrystal structure solutions are provided, together with examples of some particularly challenging structure determinations.

Spontaneous facial mimicry is modulated by joint attention and autistic traits

Joint attention (JA) and spontaneous facial mimicry (SFM) are fundamental processes in social interactions, and they are closely related to empathic abilities. When tested independently, both of these processes have been usually observed to be atypical in individuals with autism spectrum conditions (ASC). However, it is not known how these processes interact with each other in relation to autistic traits. This study addresses this question by testing the impact of JA on SFM of happy faces using a truly interactive paradigm. Sixty-two neurotypical participants engaged in gaze-based social interaction with an anthropomorphic, gaze-contingent virtual agent. The agent either established JA by initiating eye contact or looked away, before looking at an object and expressing happiness or disgust. Eye tracking was used to make the agent's gaze behavior and facial actions contingent to the participants' gaze. SFM of happy expressions was measured by Electromyography (EMG) recording over the Zygomaticus Major muscle. Results showed that JA augments SFM in individuals with low compared with high autistic traits. These findings are in line with reports of reduced impact of JA on action imitation in individuals with ASC. Moreover, they suggest that investigating atypical interactions between empathic processes, instead of testing these processes individually, might be crucial to understanding the nature of social deficits in autism

Task relevance of emotional information affects anxiety-linked attention bias in visual search

Task relevance affects emotional attention in healthy individuals. Here, we investigate whether the association between anxiety and attention bias is affected by the task relevance of emotion during an attention task. Participants completed two visual search tasks. In the emotion-irrelevant task, participants were asked to indicate whether a discrepant face in a crowd of neutral, middle-aged faces was old or young. Irrelevant to the task, target faces displayed angry, happy, or neutral expressions. In the emotion-relevant task, participants were asked to indicate whether a discrepant face in a crowd of middle-aged neutral faces was happy or angry (target faces also varied in age). Trait anxiety was not associated with attention in the emotion-relevant task. However, in the emotion-irrelevant task, trait anxiety was associated with a bias for angry over happy faces. These findings demonstrate that the task relevance of emotional information affects conclusions about the presence of an anxiety-linked attention bias.