Motor learning and attentional focus have been examined quite extensively; however, results regarding the best type of attentional focus for novice learners are equivocal. The purpose of the current study was to determine which type of attentional focus is most beneficial over extended practice phases when learning the complex skill of the volleyball serve. Three novice learners who had no prior formalized training in the sport of volleyball completed 240 service trials over eight days after an initial baseline phase. A single-subject design with alternating treatments was employed in this study. After receiving initial instructions, each participant served three blocks of 10 serves scored on a four point system based on that used by Wulf and colleagues (2002). After baseline scoring was established, the participants were given either external or internal focus instructions. The type of instructions that were given to the participants alternated every 60 serves and the order of the treatments was counterbalanced across participants. The participants completed a total of 120 serves using each type of focus. Visual inspection of the results, as well as the effect size of both types of instructional statements, revealed no clear trends for any of the participants. This study expanded the breadth of research in the field of attentional focus and will aid future studies examining the effects of attentional focus on the acquisition of sport specific skills. / School of Physical Education, Sport, and Exercise Science

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Attentional orienting involves two neuroanatomically and functionally separate components, the reflexive and voluntary attentional sub-systems, which interact to orient attention on the environment. Three experiments, in which a cueing paradigm was used, examined reflexive and voluntary orienting over later childhood development (i.e., 8--14 years old) in order to explore the mechanisms underlying the development of the control of attentional orienting. Experiments 1 and 2 explored whether reflexive and voluntary orienting develop in parallel, and examined the influence of cue predictability on attentional orienting during development. Experiment 3 explored the role of explicit instructions in the influence of cue predictability on voluntary and reflexive orienting. The results indicate that the development of attentional orienting over later childhood is a reflection of the operation of an underlying mechanism, general developmental changes in speed of processing. Apart from this mechanism, the efficiency of attentional orienting remains the same across age. In addition, the influence of cue predictability on attentional orienting reflects the operation of a low-level mechanism which operates independently of strategic influences; this mechanism may be covariance detection and judgment. The implications of these conclusions for modeling attentional orienting, and the development thereof, are considered.

To date, research on cognitive aging has treated attention as a unitary resource that operates according to a single mechanism of top-down selection. However, contemporary theoretical models of attention propose that it is a distributed resource, embedded in distinct cortical subsystems, and operates in a manner that reflects the properties of those subsystems. For instance, perceptual attention is thought to originate in posterior sensory subsystems and filter competing unattended input prior to encoding, resulting in early selection of attended information. Executive attention, by contrast, is thought to originate in frontal control subsystems and filter unattended input after encoding, resulting in late selection of attended information. Guided by a distributed resource model, the work described here focuses on how healthy advanced aging influences early selection mechanisms embedded in posterior subsystems, perceptual encoding, and the relationship with frontal subsystems mediating late selection. To examine perceptual attention in isolation, object discrimination tasks were devised in which perceptual competition between repeated objects was manipulated while holding demand on executive control constant. Cortical mechanisms of early selection were probed using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) indices of neural response and adaptation. Evidence of an age-related impairment in early selection was detected across two fMRI experiments. Unlike young adults, unattended objects not only interfered with perceptual encoding in older adults, but were co-encoded along with the contents of attended input. Age impairments in early selection were also associated with greater reliance on frontally-mediated late selection resources, and, reduced functional connectivity with basal forebrain nuclei. In sum, the results indicate that with increasing age, frontal control subsystems become increasingly encumbered with compensatory redistribution of function from the perceptual cortices, possibly due to loss of central cholinergic integrity. Many well-described age-related deficits of executive attention may therefore represent a consequence of impaired early selection, rather than its cause.

Previous works suggest that North Americans perceive visual information more analytically while East Asians perceive visual information more holistically. However, salient objects are also known to naturally attract human attention. Current studies examined to what extent culture influences visual attention. Study 1 demonstrated that highly salient objects attract passive viewers attention similarly across North American and East Asian cultures. In study 2, however, we revealed that such strong tendency for humans can be influenced by culture when people actively engaged in the observation. When participants were asked to report their observation, Canadian participants predominantly reported information regarding focal objects whereas Japanese participants also reported much information regarding contextual features. Consistently, culturally divergent patterns of eye movements were observed. The current study thus indicates that the active involvement in observation is especially important to understand the influence of culture on visual attention.

The main purpose of this series of studies was to investigate the efficacy of attentional coping strategies in altering children's responses to a painful experience. After a review of the theoretical and empirical links between pain experience and attention, Studies 1-4 compared the efficacy of imagery-based strategies that focussed attention away from a painful experience (distraction) or towards a painful experience (sensory-focussing) on 7- to 14-year-old children??s responses to cold-pressor pain. Image calibration studies (Studies 1-2) ensured that the imagery interventions were matched for other important parameters including affect and vividness. Studies 3 and 4 found that imagery-based attentional coping strategies led to increased tolerance of cold-pressor pain relative to a no-treatment control. Study 3 found that younger children (7-9 years) had better pain outcomes when assigned to the distraction condition than the sensory-focussing condition. For older children (10-14 years) the efficacy of different attentional interventions depended on the degree to which the strategy matched the child's preferred use of distraction as a coping style, providing partial support for the congruence hypothesis. Studies 5-6 tested the novel hypothesis that provision of sensory information before a painful experience may enhance the efficacy of an attentional coping strategy such as distraction. In line with self-regulation theory, children who received preparatory sensory information as well as a distraction intervention showed longer pain tolerance, lower pain intensity ratings, and a trend towards less facial pain expressions than if they received either intervention alone. These findings are discussed in terms of key attentional theories, and theories of attentional development. Implications for theory, clinical practice and further research are also considered.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Toronto, 2004. / Adviser: Russell Schachar.

Thesis (B.A. (Hons.))--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Psychology, 1979.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wollongong, 2003. / Typescript. Bibliographical references: leaf 285-306.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Bonn, Germany. / Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references and index.