"Reorienting negativity"

OBJECTIVE: As one of the most popular and extensively studied paradigms of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), event-related potential-based BCIs (ERP-BCIs) are usually built and tested in ideal laboratory settings in most existing studies, with subjects concentrating on stimuli and intentionally avoiding possible distractors. This study is aimed at examining the effect of simultaneous mental activities on ERP-BCIs by manipulating various levels of mental workload during the training and/or testing of an ERP-BCI...

The ability to understand speech under adverse listening conditions deteriorates with age. In addition to genuine hearing deficits, age-related declines in attentional and inhibitory control are assumed to contribute to these difficulties. Here, the impact of task-irrelevant distractors on speech perception was studied in 28 younger and 24 older participants in a simulated "cocktail party" scenario. In a two-alternative forced-choice word discrimination task, the participants responded to a rapid succession of short speech stimuli ("on" and "off") that was presented at a frequent standard location or at a rare deviant location in silence or with a concurrent distractor speaker...

INTRODUCTION: We measured duration mismatch negativity (dMMN), P3a, and reorienting negativity (RON) in subjects with at-risk mental state (ARMS), patients with first-episode or chronic schizophrenia, and healthy volunteers. The main interest was to determine if these event-related potentials provide a biomarker associated with progression to overt schizophrenia in ARMS subjects. METHODS: Nineteen ARMS subjects meeting the criteria of the Comprehensive Assessment of ARMS, 38 patients with schizophrenia (19 first-episode and 19 chronic), and 19 healthy controls participated in the study...

STUDY OBJECTIVES: Permanent night-shift workers may develop shift-work disorder (SWD). In the current study, we evaluated neurophysiological and behavioral indices of distractibility across times prior to the night shift (T1), during night hours (T2), and after acute sleep deprivation (T3) in permanent hospital night workers with and without SWD. METHODS: Ten asymptomatic night workers (NW) and 18 NW with SWD participated in a 25-h sleep deprivation study. Circadian phase was evaluated by dim-light salivary melatonin onset (DLMO)...

Maintaining a selective attention set allows us to efficiently perform sensory tasks despite the multitude of concurrent sensory stimuli. Unpredictably occurring, rare events nonetheless capture our attention, that is, we get distracted. The present study investigated the efficiency of control over distraction as a function of preparation time available before a forthcoming distracter. A random sequence of short and long tones (100 or 200 ms with 50-50 % probability) was presented. Independently from tone duration, occasionally (13...

Event-related potentials (ERPs) offer unique insights into processes related to involuntary attention changes triggered by rare, unpredictably occurring sensory events, that is, distraction. Contrasting ERPs elicited by distracters and frequent standard stimuli in oddball paradigms allowed the formulation of a three-stage model describing distraction-related processing: first, the distracting event is highlighted by a sensory filter. Second, attention is oriented towards the event, and finally, the task-optimal attention set is restored, or task priorities are changed...

Distraction of goal-oriented performance by a sudden change in the auditory environment is an everyday life experience. Different types of changes can be distracting, including a sudden onset of a transient sound and a slight deviation of otherwise regular auditory background stimulation. With regard to deviance detection, it is assumed that slight changes in a continuous sequence of auditory stimuli are detected by a predictive coding mechanisms and it has been demonstrated that this mechanism is capable of distracting ongoing task performance...

OBJECTIVE: The present study investigated the role of executive control in accounting for the cognitive and electrophysiological alterations occurring in healthy aging. METHOD: Younger and older adults performed the inhibitory control task (ICT), a task composed of 3 types of trials that vary in the degree and kind of executive control subprocesses required. We analyzed event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by these ICT trials and focused on the ERP components related to executive control subprocesses: P3b (updating), no-go P3 (inhibition), and reorienting negativity (RON; shifting)...

Aging usually affects the ability to focus attention on a given task and to ignore distractors. However, aging is also associated with increased between-subject variability, and it is unclear in which features of processing older high-performing and low-performing human beings may differ in goal-directed behavior. To study involuntary shifts in attention to task-irrelevant deviant stimuli and subsequent reorientation, we used an auditory distraction task and analyzed event-related potential measures (mismatch negativity), P3a and reorienting negativity) of 35 younger, 32 older high-performing, and 32 older low-performing participants...

The relation between informal musical activities at home and electrophysiological indices of neural auditory change detection was investigated in 2-3-year-old children. Auditory event-related potentials were recorded in a multi-feature paradigm that included frequency, duration, intensity, direction, gap deviants and attention-catching novel sounds. Correlations were calculated between these responses and the amount of musical activity at home (i.e. musical play by the child and parental singing) reported by the parents...

Adults of three age groups (18-27, 39-45, and 59-66 years) performed an auditory duration discrimination task with short (200 ms) or long (400 ms) sinusoidal tones. Performance was highly accurate and reaction times were on the same level in all groups, indicating no differences in auditory duration processing. Task irrelevant rare changes of the frequency of the stimuli were introduced to check whether the subjects, firstly, were distracted by changes in the environment while focusing on the task relevant information (indicated by prolonged responses), and, secondly, could re-focus on the relevant task after distraction...

Involuntary attention switches triggered by infrequent, unpredictably occurring sensory events (distraction) can be prevented when participants are made aware of the forthcoming distractor. Previous studies exploring this phenomenon presented visual cues before each stimulus in an auditory oddball sequence. In one condition, cues were completely reliable in predicting the forthcoming distractor or standard sound, in another, separate condition, they were completely unreliable. These studies found that in the condition with reliable cues, distraction was reduced compared to that with unreliable cues, as signaled by decreased reaction time delay as well as reduced P3a and reorienting negativity event-related potentials...

BACKGROUND: Deficits in automatic sensory discrimination, as indexed by a reduction in the mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3a event-related potential amplitudes, are well documented in chronic schizophrenia. However, MMN and P3a have not been sufficiently studied early in the course of psychotic illness. The present study aimed to investigate MMN, P3a and reorienting negativity (RON) across the course of schizophrenia. METHOD: MMN, P3a, and RON were assessed in 118 subjects across four groups: (1) individuals at risk for psychosis (n=26); (2) recent-onset patients (n=31); (3) chronic patients (n=33); and (4) normal controls (n=28) using a duration-deviant auditory oddball paradigm...

Dopaminergic nigro-striatal depletion interferes with the detection of novel stimuli. This suggests that Parkinson's disease (PD) may generate from the initial stages a failure in involuntary attention (IA), which can be studied through the distraction potential, composed by the mismatch negativity (MMN), the P3a and the reorientation negativity (RON). This study analyzed IA using event-related potentials (ERPs) in patients with early PD with and without dopaminergic replacement therapy. Twenty-five medicated, and 17 non-medicated patients with early PD were studied, as well as 20 healthy control subjects...

Temporal regularity allows predicting the temporal locus of future information thereby potentially facilitating cognitive processing. We applied event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate how temporal regularity impacts pre-attentive and attentive processing of deviance in the auditory modality. Participants listened to sequences of sinusoidal tones differing exclusively in pitch. The inter-stimulus interval (ISI) in these sequences was manipulated to convey either isochronous or random temporal structure...

Rare irregular sounds (deviants) embedded into a regular sound sequence have large potential to draw attention to themselves (distraction). It has been previously shown that distraction, as manifested by behavioral response delay, and the P3a and reorienting negativity (RON) event-related potentials, could be reduced when the forthcoming deviant was signaled by visual cues preceding the sounds. In the present study, we investigated the type of information used in the prevention of distraction by manipulating the information content of the visual cues preceding the sounds...

A behavioral drug preference procedure was used to identify two groups of healthy individuals. One group preferred 10 mg of d-amphetamine over placebo (Choosers) and the other preferred placebo (Nonchoosers). In separate sessions, participants were administered placebo, 10, and 15 mg of d-amphetamine, and event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants performed two 3-stimulus oddball tasks. The effect of d-amphetamine on P3a, an ERP index of the orienting response, differed between groups: In Choosers, target stimuli elicited P3a after d-amphetamine but not after placebo; in Nonchoosers, the drug had no effect on P3a...

The width of the attentional focus during the selection of one of two concurrent normal human participants was investigated using event-related potentials. Two stories were presented from virtual locations located 15° to the left and right azimuth by convolving the speech message by the appropriate head-related transfer function determined for each individual participant. Task irrelevant probe stimuli (phoneme/da/uttered by the same speaker as the story) were presented in rapid sequence from the same virtual locations...

BACKGROUND: We investigated the processing of task-irrelevant and unexpected novel sounds and its modulation by working-memory load in children aged 9-10 and in adults. Environmental sounds (novels) were embedded amongst frequently presented standard sounds in an auditory-visual distraction paradigm. Each sound was followed by a visual target. In two conditions, participants evaluated the position of a visual stimulus (0-back, low load) or compared the position of the current stimulus with the one two trials before (2-back, high load)...

Attention is controlled by the interplay of sensory input and top-down processes. We compared attentional control processes during task switching and reorientation after distraction. The primary task was to discriminate laterally and centrally presented tones; these stimuli were composed of a frequent standard or an infrequent deviant pitch. In the distraction condition, pitch was irrelevant and could be ignored. In the switch condition, pitch changes were relevant: whenever a deviant tone was presented, participants had to discriminate its pitch and not its direction...