A large number of research found that multitasking behavior can impair people's explicit memory performance. Television advertisements thus are increasingly being regarded as a waste of money in the era of media when people are used to multitasking to avoid TV advertisements. However, recent studies indicated that the dissociation in attentional resources does not always lead to impairment in i...

Previous studies on attentional biases often show contradictory results. This suggests that important moderating variables have been neglected so far. We suggest that (1) control over potential consequences and (2) satisfaction with the current status are important factors that need to be considered. We explored the influence of these variables using a colour classification task, where colours ...

According to perceptual load theory (Lavie, 2005) distractor interference is determined by the availability of attentional resources. If target processing does not exhaust resources (with low perceptual load) distractor processing will take place resulting in interference with a primary task; however, when target processing uses-up attentional capacity (with high perceptual load) interference c...

The spatial attention mechanisms of orienting and zooming cooperate to properly select visual information from the environment and plan eye movements accordingly. Despite the fact that orienting ability has been extensively studied in infancy, the zooming mechanism--namely, the ability to distribute the attentional resources to a small or large portion of the visual field--has never been tested...

When engaged in a demanding task, individuals may neglect unexpected visual stimuli presented concomitantly. Here we use a change detection task to show that propensity to inattention is associated with a flexible allocation of attentional resources to filter and represent visual information. This was reflected by N2 posterior contralateral (N2pc) and contralateral delay activity (CDA) respecti...

Faces expressing fear may attract attention in an automatic bottom-up fashion. Here we address this issue with magneto-encephalographic (MEG) recordings in subjects performing a demanding visual search combined with the presentation of irrelevant neutral or fearful faces. The impact of the faces' emotional expression on attentional selection was assessed by analyzing the N2pc component--a modul...

BACKGROUND This study investigated the effects of obesity on attentional resources allocated to postural control in seating and unipedal standing. METHODS Ten non obese adults (BMI = 22.4±1.3, age = 42.4±15.1) and 10 obese adult patients (BMI = 35.2±2.8, age = 46.2±19.6) maintained postural stability on a force platform in two postural tasks (seated and unipedal). The two postural tasks were ...

Emotionally arousing stimuli are known to rapidly draw the brain's processing resources, even when they are task-irrelevant. The steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) response, a neural response to a flickering stimulus which effectively allows measurement of the processing resources devoted to that stimulus, has been used to examine this process of attentional shifting. Previous studies...