Willifordmccarty7941
Animal physiological and human neuroimaging studies have established a link between attention and γ-band (30-90 Hz) oscillations and synchronizations. However, a behavioral link between entrained γ-band oscillations and attention has been fraught with technical challenges. In particular, while entrainment at mid-γ band (40-70 Hz) has been claimed to be privileged in evoking attentional modulations without awareness, the effect may be attributed to display artifacts. Here, by exploiting isoluminant chromatic flicker without luminance modulation and not subject to these artifacts, we tested attentional attraction by chromatic flicker too fast to perceive. Awareness of flicker was subjectively and objectively tested with a high-powered design and evaluated with traditional and Bayesian statistics. Across 2 experiments in human participants, we observed-and also replicated-that 30-Hz chromatic flicker outside mid-γ band attracted attention, resulting in a facilitation effect at a 50 ms interstimulus interval (ISI) and an inhibition effect at a 500 ms ISI. The attention test was confirmed to be more sensitive to the cue than the direct cue-localization task was. We further showed that these attention effects were absent for 50-Hz chromatic flicker. These results provide strong direct evidence against a privileged role of mid-γ band in unconscious attention, but are consistent with known cortical responses to chromatic flicker in early visual cortex. Taken together, our findings provide behavioral evidence that entrained synchronization may serve as a mechanism for bottom-up attention selection and that chromatic flicker may offer a fruitful avenue for investigating unconscious processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).Parkinson's disease impairs motor function and cognition, which together affect language and communication. Cospeech gestures are a form of language-related actions that provide imagistic depictions of the speech content they accompany. Gestures rely on visual and motor imagery, but it is unknown whether gesture representations require the involvement of intact neural sensory and motor systems. We tested this hypothesis with a fine-grained analysis of cospeech action gestures in Parkinson's disease. Thirty-seven people with Parkinson's disease and 33 controls described 2 scenes featuring actions which varied in their inherent degree of bodily motion. In addition to the perspective of action gestures (gestural viewpoint/first- vs. third-person perspective), we analyzed how Parkinson's patients represent manner (how something/someone moves) and path information (where something/someone moves to) in gesture, depending on the degree of bodily motion involved in the action depicted. We replicated an earlier finding that people with Parkinson's disease are less likely to gesture about actions from a first-person perspective-preferring instead to depict actions gesturally from a third-person perspective-and show that this effect is modulated by the degree of bodily motion in the actions being depicted. When describing high-motion actions, the Parkinson's group were specifically impaired in depicting manner information in gesture and their use of third-person path-only gestures was significantly increased. Gestures about low-motion actions were relatively spared. These results inform our understanding of the neural and cognitive basis of gesture production by providing neuropsychological evidence that action gesture production relies on intact motor network function. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).When models of the attentional control of vocal naming, applied to color-word Stroop and picture-word interference, were first computationally implemented and examined in 1990, an implementable model proposed by Wundt (1880, 1902) was not considered. Although these modern computer models, and more recent ones, clarify many aspects of the interference, most models fail to explain its time course, as outlined in Roelofs (2003). Wundt's (1902) model assigns a key role to top-down inhibition, which is absent in most of the modern models. Here, an implementation of his model is presented, called Wundt 2.0. https://www.selleckchem.com/products/cpi-0610.html The necessity of perceptual inhibition was demonstrated by computer simulations of the interference and its time course, and supported by existing evidence from oscillatory brain activity in the alpha frequency band. Moreover, a new empirical study showed that Raven scores measuring the general intelligence factor g, discovered by Wundt's student Spearman (1904), predict the magnitude of the Stroop effect in fast errors, in line with the model and evidence on alpha band activity. Also, the study provided evidence that response inhibition is absent during vocal naming in the Stroop task. To conclude, Wundt's model has stood the test of time and provides a number of enduring lessons for our understanding of attention and performance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).Optimal foraging theory suggests that animals have evolved to maximize their net rate of energy intake; all things being equal, they should leave a current depleting patch when an alternative patch would provide either more or sooner food. In nature, however, typically all things are not equal. For example, uncertainty about the value of alternative patches, time to travel to those patches, and potential dangers incurred in changing patches may delay leaving the depleting patch, when it would otherwise be optimal to do so. We tested the hypothesis that leaving the current patch may be delayed, by providing pigeons (Columba livia) with a continuous choice between a progressive schedule, in which each access to food could be obtained with an increasing number of pecks, and a multiple schedule, in which a colored light signaled the number of pecks required for food. The pigeons could switch from the progressive schedule to the multiple schedule at any time. We asked if pigeons would tend to switch when the signaled multiple schedule required fewer pecks than the next reinforcer provided by the progressive schedule. We found that pigeons tended to switch to the multiple schedule sooner than would have been optimal-one might say they precrastinated. We propose that, on the progressive schedule, the signal to switch was not just the number of pecks required for the next reinforcer but also the more general cue that reinforcement was becoming more difficult to obtain-a form of serial pattern learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).