Momentary reductions of attention permit greater processing of irrelevant stimuli
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Momentary reductions of attention can have extremely adverse outcomes, but it remains unclear whether increased distraction from irrelevant stimuli contributes to such outcomes. To investigate this hypothesis, we examined trial-by-trial relationships between brain activity and response time in twenty healthy adults while they performed a cross-modal selective attention task. In each trial, participants identified a relevant visual letter while ignoring an irrelevant auditory letter, which was mapped either to the same response as the visual letter (congruent trials) or to a different response (incongruent trials). As predicted, reductions of attention (i.e., increases of response time) were associated not only with decreased activity in sensory regions that processed the relevant visual stimuli, suggesting a failure to enhance the processing of those stimuli, but also with increased activity in sensory regions that processed the irrelevant auditory stimuli, suggesting a failure to suppress the processing of those stimuli. Reductions of attention were also linked to larger increases of activity in incongruent than in congruent trials in anterior cingulate regions that detect response conflict, suggesting that failing to suppress the sensory processing of the irrelevant auditory stimuli during attentional reductions allowed those stimuli to more readily activate conflicting responses in incongruent trials. These findings indicate that heightened levels of distraction during momentary reductions of attention likely stem, at least in part, from increased processing of irrelevant stimuli.
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Increased activity in the posterior cingulate, precuneus, and middle temporal gyrus occurs at stimulus presentation during long reaction time trials.
“Another intriguing RTV-related functional imaging finding is increased activity in the posterior cingulate, precuneus, and middle temporal gyrus at the time of stimulus presentation during long RT trials [64].”
From Reaction Time Variability in ADHD: A Review (2012) · cites this paper as [64]
In an event-related design, intermittent long reaction times were associated with decreased frontal cortex activity prior to stimulus presentation.
“However, using an eventrelated design, Weissman et al. [64] did examine brain activation around long RTs and found that instances of intermittent long RTs were associated with decreased activity in the frontal cortex prior to stimulus presentation.”
From Reaction Time Variability in ADHD: A Review (2012) · cites this paper as [64]
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- Authors
- Weissman, D. H., Warner, L. M., & Woldorff, M. G.
- Affiliations
- University of Michigan (US)
- Duke University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Weissman, D.H.
- Venue
- NeuroImage
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2009-11
- Volume
- 48
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 609-615
- ISSN
- 1053-8119 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC2738758
- OpenAlex
- W1991734615
- Cited by
- 43
- References
- 38
- Citations by year
- 2025: 1 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 1 · 2020: 1 · 2018: 2 · 2017: 4 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 3 · 2014: 4 · 2013: 5 · 2012: 6
- FWCI
- 2.10
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- NeuroImage (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institutes of Health (1r03da021345-01)
- National Institute on Drug Abuse (1R03DA021345-01, R03 DA021345)
- National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (R01NS051048)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Multisensory perception and integration
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Visual Attention and Saliency Detection
- Keywords
- distraction, reaction time (psychology), response conflict, anterior cingulate cortex
- MeSH terms
- Acoustic Stimulation, Adult, Attention, Auditory Perception, Brain, Brain Mapping, Female, Gyrus Cinguli, Humans, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Male, Neuropsychological Tests, Photic Stimulation, Reaction Time, Task Performance and Analysis, Visual Perception, Young Adult
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