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 ...

While counting objects is typically a slow, serial process, enumerating about four or fewer objects has been considered to be a relatively effortless, parallel, and even preattentive process often referred to as subitizing. However, by combining a subitizing task with an attentional blink task, we show that subitizing is systematically affected by a closely preceding letter identification task....

Information that is relevant to oneself tends to be remembered more than information that relates to other people, but the role of attention in eliciting this "self-reference effect" is unclear. In the present study, we assessed the importance of attention in self-referential encoding using an ownership paradigm, which required participants to encode items under conditions of imagined ownership...

Introducing automation into automobiles had inevitable consequences for the driver and driving. Systems that automate longitudinal and lateral vehicle control may reduce the workload of the driver. This raises questions of what the driver is able to do with this ‘spare’ attentional capacity. Research in our laboratory suggests that there is unlikely to be any spare capacity because the attentio...

Despite increasing evidence suggesting interactive effects of emotion and attention on perceptual processing, it still remains unclear how their interplay influences affective learning, such as fear conditioning. In the present study, a conditioning procedure using threat-related conditioned stimuli (CSs) was implemented while executive load and attentional focus were manipulated. The modulatio...