The abilities to flexibly allocate attention, select between conflicting stimuli, and make anticipatory gaze movements are important for young children's exploration and learning about their environment. These abilities constitute voluntary control of attention and show marked improvements in the second year of a child's life. Here we investigate the effects of visual distraction and delay on 1...

Selective attention is the top-down mechanism to allocate neuronal processing resources to the most relevant subset of the information provided by an organism's sensors. Attentional selection of a spatial location modulates the spatial-tuning characteristics (i.e., the receptive fields of neurons in macaque visual cortex). These tuning changes include a shift of receptive field centers toward t...

1188 Our sensory system is constantly bombarded with inputs, but owing to the brain's fi nite processing power, we are forced to pay attention to only a tiny proportion of these inputs at any given time. In a new study, Richard Davidson and colleagues report that intensive training in meditation can alter the way in which the brain allocates attentional resources to important stimuli, allowing ...

BACKGROUND Alcohol warning labels have a limited effect on drinking behavior, potentially because people devote minimal attention to them. We report findings from two studies in which we measured the extent to which alcohol consumers attend to warning labels on alcohol packaging, and aimed to identify if increased attention to warning labels is associated with motivation to change drinking beha...

Attention facilitates conscious perception of a visual stimulus at an attended location. Interestingly, a recent study (using the Posner spatial-cueing task) reported that attention facilitated conscious perception even when it was cued after a stimulus was gone (postcued-attention or retroperception effect). Here, we show that this effect can be induced without any contribution of attention. C...

Peripheral displays allow continuous awareness of information while performing other activities. Monitoring such a display while performing a central task has a cognitive cost that depends on its perceptual salience and the distraction it causes, i.e. the amount of attention it attracts away from the user’s primary action. This paper considers the particular case of peripheral displays for inte...

A vast amount of information about the external world continuously flows into the brain, whereas its capacity to process such information is limited. Attention enables the brain to allocate its resources of information processing to selected sensory inputs for reducing its computational load, and effects of attention have been extensively studied in visual information processing. However, how t...

Fertilization decisions depend on the measurement of a large set soil fertility indicators, usually through laboratory determination, which is costly and time-consuming. Visible near-infrared (vis-NIR) spectroscopy combined with machine learning can simultaneously predict various indicators. Spectroscopy inherently less accurate than direct determination. However, in many fertilization recommen...