Living environments are seldom, if ever, devoid of all background auditory stimuli. However, the relationship between particular structural components of acoustic backgrounds and cognitive task performance remains unclear. Two experiments were completed to examine the influence of sound on a visual selective attention task. Participants performed the Stroop task (Stroop, 1935) while silence or background acoustic patterns of various complexities were presented over headphones. No effect of background sound on performance was found. A post-hoc analysis indicated that in comparison with participants who do not regularly listen to music while studying, participants who regularly listen to music while studying performed better on the Stroop task when a structured auditory pattern that included variation in both frequency and time interval was presented in the background. These results indicate that distinct structural components of background auditory sequences may interact with individual characteristics to influence cognitive performance on a task involving selective attention.

Evarcha culicivora, a species of jumping spider (Araneae: Salticidae from the Lake Victoria region of East Africa, has unusual prey-choice behaviour. It preferred prey is blood-carrying mosquitoes. It also has unusually complex mate-choice behaviour, with mutual mate choice being pronounced. This thesis is a study of E. culicivora’s prey-choice behaviour and mate-choice behaviour, as well as a study of processes underlying selective attention in this unusual species. E. culicivora uses olfaction in unique and often surprising ways. This includes identifying potential mates by odour alone, as well as choosing the odour of potential mates that have recently fed on blood-carrying mosquitoes. The odour of potential mates also primes both sexes for escalating conflict with potential rivals, as well as priming selective attention to the masked odour of specifically potential mates. Besides all this, the odour of blood-carrying mosquitoes primes E. culicivora to selectively attend to the masked odour of specifically this prey. Moreover, the appearance of blood-carrying mosquitoes and of potential mates primes E. culicivora to selectively attend to specifically the appearance of cryptic blood-carrying mosquitoes and cryptic potential mates, respectively. Vision and olfaction can even work together, with olfactory and visual cues from blood-carrying mosquitoes priming E. culicivora to selectively attend to the appearance and odour, respectively, of blood-carrying mosquitoes. Furthermore, E. culicivora has a poorly-understood relationship with two plant species, Lantana camara and Ricinus communis, and E. culicivora can identify these two plant species by odour alone. These plants may be relevant to this salticid as a nectar source by which it supplements its insect diet, but these plants may also be as sites at which E. culicivora males and females find potential mates, with E. culicivora’s interactions on these plants being especially exaggerated and complex.

The discourse of older healthy adults is commonly described as lengthy and off-topic and thought to be associated with a general cognitive decline that occurs in healthy aging. This study investigated the overall decline in attention associated with healthy aging and its relationship to instances of off-topic speech (OTS) in a constrained and unconstrained language production task. Ninety cognitively healthy adults participated and comprised three age cohorts (40 – 75+). Participants completed cognitive measures of attention and two discourse tasks that included recounting personal events and describing a procedure. Older adults exhibited poorer scores on measures of selective and shifting attention, and elderly adults produced more OTS as compared to middle-aged (40s) and older (60s) adults in the unconstrained task only. Poorer scores of shifting attention were significantly correlated with more OTS in the older adults (60s) only. Overall, a marked increase in variability of language production was observed with advancing age. Results indicated the need for further research on the relationships between age, attention, OTS, and task type in healthy aging to determine an underlying cause for increasing variability of language production with age.

The aim of this study is to find out whether there is any difference to be found in the attention ability before and after physical activity. The method used in this study was made of an experimental design. The participants were chosen through a cluster sampling and thereafter divided into a control group and an experimental group. A total of 64 pupils from upper secondary school participated in the study, 25 of them in the experimental group and 39 of them in the control group. Since the measure was repeated, both in respect of time and the comparison between the groups, a mixed design was used. The attention ability was measured on both occasions with a revised 7-series-test that measures vigilance and selective attention. On the first occasion the participants were supposed to subtract 7 from 1000 and on the second occasion to subtract 7 from 995. The more subtractions the participant had time for within the given five minute time range, the higher attention ability the participant were considered to have. The attention ability was for the experimental group measured before and after a gym lesson, while for the control group their attention ability was measured before and after a theoretical lesson. The results showed that there were a significant difference between the two test occasions, and there were also a significant difference in between the test groups. While both of the groups improved their results in the second test occasion, the experimental group performed better than the control group did on both test occasions. The results did not indicate any interactional effect, which means that the test score achieved by the individual test person on test 1 and 2 did not depend on whether the person was a member of the control group or the experimental group. On the second occasion, which was the test conducted after the physical activity, the experimental group improved their results slightly more than the control group did. However, the results did not improve as much for it to be considered a significant difference. In conclusion, there was no difference found in the attention ability before or after physical activity.

Living environments are seldom, if ever, devoid of all background auditory stimuli. However, the relationship between particular structural components of acoustic backgrounds and cognitive task performance remains unclear. Two experiments were completed to examine the influence of sound on a visual selective attention task. Participants performed the Stroop task (Stroop, 1935) while silence or background acoustic patterns of various complexities were presented over headphones. No effect of background sound on performance was found. A post-hoc analysis indicated that in comparison with participants who do not regularly listen to music while studying, participants who regularly listen to music while studying performed better on the Stroop task when a structured auditory pattern that included variation in both frequency and time interval was presented in the background. These results indicate that distinct structural components of background auditory sequences may interact with individual characteristics to influence cognitive performance on a task involving selective attention.

One means by which inhibitory control in selective attention may be studied is with the negative priming (NP) procedure. It is widely assumed that children are characterised by reduced capacity for inhibition (Diamond, 2002) and that inhibitory dysfunction is a key characteristic of children and adolescents with ADHD (Barkley, 1997). This should translate into reduced NP effects for these populations. In this dissertation, four studies using the NP procedure find no evidence for reduced inhibitory function in typical children or in adolescents with ADHD. Study 1 examined the magnitude of NP in children compared with adults. An important line of support for the idea that children suffer an inhibitory decrement has been based an empirical report suggesting that conceptual (identity or semantic) NP effects, assumed to reflect the by-product of distractor inhibition, while consistently found in adults are lacking in children (Tipper, Bourque, Anderson, & Brehaut, 1989). In Study 1, the opposite result was found. Study 2 compared NP effects between 7-year-old children and adults while replicating the respective methodologies of the only two studies to explore conceptual NP effects in developmental populations to date (Pritchard & Neumann, 2004, vs. Tipper et al., 1989) to determine the nature of the divergent results between these studies. In Study 2, it was found that distractor inhibition effects are comparable between children and adults when a NP task contains trials in which the distractor stimulus is consistently incongruent with the target stimulus, but that children may be more susceptible than adults to divide attention between target and distractor when a NP task contains a number of trials in which target selection difficulty is reduced. These are critical new findings, highlighting that reduced NP may often relate to methodological artifacts, and when considered in the light of current theories of NP, are also problematic for anti-inhibitory accounts of NP. Having distinguished more definitively the role of inhibition in developmental NP effects, Studies 3 and 4 explored whether the inhibitory process underpinning NP was implicated in young persons with ADHD. To date, evidence for NP in ADHD populations is equivocal. Study 3 found no evidence for a reduced NP effect in ADHD devoid of a corresponding diagnosis. Study 4 found that conduct and oppositional defiant disorders had the potential to confound the evaluation of NP in ADHD. Taken together, results in Studies 1 - 4 parallel very recent results in the literature on NP in older adults and adult psychopathology where presumed reductions of NP in these populations may also be accounted for by methodological artifacts (Buchner & Mayr, in press). It is concluded that NP may reflect a primitive and robust form of inhibitory processing, one that develops early and one that is often the last to deteriorate.

Tabagistas atendem seletivamente a estímulos ambientais relacionados ao cigarro, um processo cognitivo implícito denominado viés na atenção (VA). Contudo, não está claro se o VA persiste em ex-fumantes. Por isso, avaliou-se a influência do tempo de abstinência no VA em 62 ex-fumantes (de 50±11 anos) através de uma tarefa de atenção visual em computador. Independente do tempo de abstinência, os participantes evitaram as pistas associadas ao tabaco. Esta esquiva foi mais pronunciada em tempos de exposição maiores. Os ex-fumantes também atribuíram pouca valência emocional às imagens associadas ao cigarro e reportaram índices baixos de fissura antes e após a tarefa. O VA negativo e a menor valência emocional destas pistas podem constituir um processo de modulação da atenção típico da abstinência prolongada, no qual estratégias cognitivas são empregadas para manter este estado. Os resultados obtidos contribuem para a compreensão da cognição implícita na adição e sua importância no tratamento e prevenção do tabagismo. / Smokers selectively attend to smoking-related cues, an implicit cognitive process called attentional bias (AB). However, it is unclear whether former smokers present AB. Therefore, we evaluated the influence of abstinence time in VA in 62 exsmokers (50 ± 11 years-old) through a visual probe task. Participants avoided smoking cues despite of abstinence time. This avoidance was more pronounced in longer stimuli exposition. Former smokers also attributed little emotional valence to smoking cues and reported low craving rates both before and after the task. The negative AB and low emotional valence of smoking cues might constitute a process of attentional modulation typical of longer abstinence, in which cognitive strategies are employed to maintain this state. The results contribute to the understanding of implicit cognition in addiction and its importance to smoking treatment and prevention.

Ansiedade e atenção são dois conceitos complexos, que se relacionam diretamente em função de estratégias adaptativas relacionadas à sobrevivência em seres humanos. A presente tese teve como objetivo investigar se as ansiedades de traço e de estado estariam relacionadas ao viés de atenção nos canais visual ou auditivo em uma amostra não clínica. Os capítulos apresentam experimentos com a Visual Probe Detection Task, a Escuta Dicótica e o Stroop Emocional. Todos os experimentos foram realizados em população não clínica e comparou os resultados do cálculo do viés de atenção em grupos definidos pelos escores no inventário de ansiedade de traço e de estado. Foi observada a ausência de relação entre a ansiedade de traço e de estado com o viés de atenção nestes experimentos. A falta de especificidade cognitiva dos estímulos que compõem os três experimentos foi proposta como a causa principal destes resultados. / Anxiety and attention are two complex concepts that relate directly because of adaptive strategies related to survival in humans. This doctoral thesis addressed some aspects related to these two issues. It were discussed some aspects of trait and state anxiety and the study of attentional bias in visual and auditory channels. The chapters present the empirical results of the experiments that used the Visual Probe Detection Task, the Dichotic Listening Task and the Emotional Stroop Task. All experiments were performed in non-clinical population and related the results of the evaluation of attentional bias scores with trait and state anxiety. The results showed no relationship between trait and state anxiety with the attentional bias. It discusses possible reasons for this lack of bias in these samples. Among the possibilities, the lack of cognitive specificity of stimuli that make up the three experiments was proposed as the main reason for it.

Tabagistas atendem seletivamente a estímulos ambientais relacionados ao cigarro, um processo cognitivo implícito denominado viés na atenção (VA). Contudo, não está claro se o VA persiste em ex-fumantes. Por isso, avaliou-se a influência do tempo de abstinência no VA em 62 ex-fumantes (de 50±11 anos) através de uma tarefa de atenção visual em computador. Independente do tempo de abstinência, os participantes evitaram as pistas associadas ao tabaco. Esta esquiva foi mais pronunciada em tempos de exposição maiores. Os ex-fumantes também atribuíram pouca valência emocional às imagens associadas ao cigarro e reportaram índices baixos de fissura antes e após a tarefa. O VA negativo e a menor valência emocional destas pistas podem constituir um processo de modulação da atenção típico da abstinência prolongada, no qual estratégias cognitivas são empregadas para manter este estado. Os resultados obtidos contribuem para a compreensão da cognição implícita na adição e sua importância no tratamento e prevenção do tabagismo. / Smokers selectively attend to smoking-related cues, an implicit cognitive process called attentional bias (AB). However, it is unclear whether former smokers present AB. Therefore, we evaluated the influence of abstinence time in VA in 62 exsmokers (50 ± 11 years-old) through a visual probe task. Participants avoided smoking cues despite of abstinence time. This avoidance was more pronounced in longer stimuli exposition. Former smokers also attributed little emotional valence to smoking cues and reported low craving rates both before and after the task. The negative AB and low emotional valence of smoking cues might constitute a process of attentional modulation typical of longer abstinence, in which cognitive strategies are employed to maintain this state. The results contribute to the understanding of implicit cognition in addiction and its importance to smoking treatment and prevention.

Multiple theoretical frameworks posit that interactions between the autonomic nervous system and higher-order neural networks are crucial for cognitive regulation. However, few studies have directly examined whether autonomic physiology influences brain activity during cognitive tasks, and even fewer of those studies have examined both autonomic branches when doing so. Measures of selective attention derived from event-related brain potentials (ERPs) are particularly well-suited for addressing this question, given that ERP selective attention tasks are designed to control for the influences of psychomotor processes and arousal and are predictive of higher-order cognitive function in children and adults. Such research is particularly promising for understanding how early adversity impacts neurocognitive development in children, given that stress experienced early in life impacts both autonomic function and selective attention. Here, a broad literature review is presented, integrating findings across studies of autonomic physiology, cognition, and brain activity in children and adults (Chapter 1). Then, two experiments are described where cardiac measures of parasympathetic and sympathetic activity were recorded concurrently with ERPs during an auditory selective task in a sample of adults (Chapter 2) and in a sample of preschool-aged children (Chapter 3). Results from both experiments demonstrate a key role for the sympathetic nervous system in selective attention for adults and children, such that greater sympathetic activity is associated with larger effects of selective attention on ERPs. These findings are then reviewed with suggestions for how existing models of neurovisceral integration might be updated to better emphasize the role of sympathetic nervous system activity in neurocognitive processes, emphasizing measures of threat-related and reward-related arousal, as represented by galvanic skin response and pre-ejection period, respectively (Chapter 4). Future directions are also discussed, including recommendations for future studies of neurovisceral integration to examine associations between physiology, behavior, and brain activity at the single-trial level, to incorporate participants from more diverse backgrounds of life experience, and to examine the plasticity of autonomic mechanisms implicated in neurocognitive function.