cognitive neuroscience of attention

R.E. Lubow offers a complete survey of the basic data that comprise the latent inhibition effect, and a review of theories that attempt to explain it. He then elaborates on his own Conditioned Attention Theory and derives applications for learned helplessness and schizophrenia. Latent inhibition is an exquisitely simple, robust, and pervasive behavioral phenomenon–the reduced ability of an organism to learn new associations to previously inconsequential stimuli. It has been demonstrated in a variety of animals, including humans, across many different learning tasks. The ease of demonstrating the latent inhibition effect, on the one hand, is matched by the difficulty of incorporating it into contemporary conditioning and learning theories, on the other hand. A wide range of experimental psychologists and neuroscientists will find this a stimulating and useful book for themselves and their students.

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The absence of consensual, cross-disciplinary theories, definitions, and methodologies has hampered the study of attention, memory, and executive function. Incorporating different theoretical perspectives, this exceptional volume helps establish some common understanding of these three central processes. This book reveals how the authors’ findings from their research in psychology, neuropsychology, special education, and medicine can help clinicians assess and remediate reading and attention disorders. Valuable directions for future research are also offered.

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The lastest volume in this prestigious series is dedicated to exploring how much of higher cognitive function can be explained by reduction to simpler sensorimotor processes. It uses a series of specific cognitive domains to examine the sensorimotor bases of human cognition.
The first section deals with the common neural processes for primary and ‘cognitive’ processes. It examines the key neural systems and computational architectures at the interface between cognition, sensation and action.
The second section deals with specific themes in abstract cognition: the origins of action, and the conceptual aspects of sensory, particularly somatosensory processing. It looks at how mental and neural processes of abstraction are vital to the cognitive-sensorimotor interface. It also covers topics such as tool-use, bodily awareness and executive organisation of action patterns, and probes the extent to which principles of sensorimotor information-processing extend to further hierarchical representations.
The next section deals with the representation of the self and others. The questions of self-consciousness and of attribution to other minds have a fundamental place, and a long history in psychology. At first sight, few aspects of cognition could seem more abstract, more refined than these. However, recent research suggests that sensorimotor systems are good ‘social levellers’: your sensory and motor apparatus is much like mine. Can people vicariously experience the sensory and motor events of other individuals? What aspects of social representation are explained by sensorimotor sharing, and what are not? The chapters in this section offer strongly contrasting perspectives.
The final section deals with upper limits of cognition: the most abstract and conceptual levels of thought, including action syntax, language, and consciousness. These chapters investigate which aspects, if any, of such concepts as time, space, identity and number may be linked to representations of basic sensory and motor events.
Taken as a whole, the chapters in the book provide a compelling overview and re-examination of the sensorimotor foundations of human cognition.

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This latest volume in the critically acclaimed and highly influential Attention and Performance series focuses on two of the fastest moving research areas in cognitive and affective neuroscience – decision making and emotional processing.

Decision Making, Affect, and Learning investigates the psychological and neural systems underlying decision making, and the relationship with reward, affect, and learning. In addition, it considers neurodevelopmental and clinical aspects of these issues – for example the role of decision making and reward in drug addiction. It also looks at the applied aspects of this knowledge to other disciplines, including the growing field of Neuroeconomics.

After an introductory chapter from the Volume editors, the book is then arranged according to the following themes:

Psychological Processes underlying decision-making.
Neural systems of decision-making
Neural systems of emotion, reward and learning
Neurodevelopmental and clinical aspects

Superbly written and edited, the book highlights the complex interplay between emotional and decision-making processes and their relationship with learning.

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Spatial neglect is a disorder of space-related behaviour. It is characterized by failure to explore the side of space contralateral to a brain lesion, or to react or respond to stimuli or subjects located on this side. Research on spatial neglect and related disorders has developed rapidly in recent years. These advances have been made as a result of neuropsychological studies of patients with brain damage, behavioural studies of animal models, as well as through functional neurophysiological experiments and functional neuroimaging. The Cognitive and Neural Bases of Spatial Neglect provides an overview of this wide-ranging field of scientific endeavour, providing a cohesive synthesis of the most recent observations and results. As well as being a fascinating clinical phenomenon, the study of spatial neglect helps us to understand normal mechanisms of directing and maintaining spatial attention and is relevant to the contemporary search for the cerebral correlates of conscious experience, voluntary action and the nature of personal identity itself. The book is divided into seven sections covering the anatomical and neurophysiological bases of the disorder, frameworks of neglect, perceptual and motor factors, the relation to attention, the cognitive processes involved, and strategies for rehabilitation. Chapters have been written by a team of the leading international experts in this field. This will be essential reading for neuropsychologists, neurologists, neurophysiologists, cognitive neuroscientists and psychologists.

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This volume constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Attention in Cognitive Systems, WAPCV 2008, held in Fira, Santorini, Greece in May 2008 as an associated event of the 6th International Conference on Computer Vision Systems (ICVS 2008).

The 13 revised full papers presented together with with 9 posters, have been carefully selected from 34 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on attention in scene exploration, contextueal cueing and saliency, spatiotemporal saliency, attentional networks as well as attentional modelling.

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A key property of neural processing in higher mammals is the ability to focus resources by selectively directing attention to relevant perceptions, thoughts or actions. Research into attention has grown rapidly over the past two decades, as new techniques have become available to study higher brain function in humans, non-human primates, and other mammals. Neurobiology of Attention is the first encyclopedic volume to summarize the latest developments in attention research.

An authoritative collection of over 100 chapters organized into thematic sections provides both broad coverage and access to focused, up-to-date research findings. This book presents a state-of-the-art multidisciplinary perspective on psychological, physiological and computational approaches to understanding the neurobiology of attention. Ideal for students, as a reference handbook or for rapid browsing, the book has a wide appeal to anybody intereseted in attention research.

* Contains numerous quick-reference articles covering the breadth of investigation into the subject of attention
* Provides extensive introductory commentary to orient and guide the reader
* Includes the most recent research results in this field of study

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Many organisms possess multiple sensory systems, such as vision, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. The possession of such multiple ways of sensing the world offers many benefits. These benefits arise not only because each modality can sense different aspects of the environment, but also because different senses can respond jointly to the same external object or event, thus enriching the overall experience-for example, looking at an individual while listening to them speak. However, combining the information from different senses also poses many challenges for the nervous system. In recent years, there has been dramatic progress in understanding how information from different sensory modalities gets integrated in order to construct useful representations of external space; and in how such multimodal representations constrain spatial attention. Such progress has involved numerous different disciplines, including neurophysiology, experimental psychology, neurological work with brain-damaged patients, neuroimaging studies, and computational modelling. This volume brings together the leading researchers from all these approaches, to present the first integrative overview of this central topic in cognitive neuroscience.

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The nature of attention is one of the oldest and most central problems in psychology. A huge amount of research has been produced on this subject in the last half century, especially on attention in the visual modality, but a general explanation has remained elusive. Many still view attention research as a field that is fundamentally fragmented. This book takes a different perspective and presents a unified theory of visual attention.

The TVA model explains the many aspects of visual attention by just two mechanisms for selection of information: filtering and pigeonholing. These mechanisms are described in a set of simple equations, which allow TVA to mathematically model a large number of classical results in the attention literature. The theory explains psychological and neuroscientific findings by the same equations; TVA is a complete theory of visual attention, linking mind and brain.

Aimed at advanced students and professional researchers, Principles of Visual Attention contains a detailed review of the most important research done on attention in vision, spanning cognitive psychology, brain imaging, patient studies, and recordings from single cells in the visual cortex. The book explains the TVA model and shows how it accounts for attentional effects observed across all the research areas described. Principles of Visual Attention offers a uniquely integrated view on a central topic in cognitive neuroscience.

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