Tag Archives: saccade

Ready for EPS Online!

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We’re all very excited about EPS online next week. We’ve got posters from Dan, Soazig and Siobhan uploaded to the OSF site and presentations from Siobhan and Dan (whose talk is much too long at 8mins, but some just people love the sound of thier own voice 😉 ). It’ll be our first online conference so not really sure what to expect, but hopefully we can foward to some lively discussions!

Soazig’s poster describes some work we did with an excellent group of dissertation students, whose project explored  the impact of holding things in WM on presaccadic attention. The take-home here is that we got some nice interference effects, suggesting some shared control between presaccadic attention and VWM: https://osf.io/djrvz/

Siobhan’s poster outlines the first complete experiment from her PhD, which was a conceptual replication of Schneegans & Bayes (2016) study that argued for a resource model of spatial working memory. She replicated the basic finding, but the devil is in the detail, as excluding trials with eye-movements produces some interesting changes to the modelling https://osf.io/nphqv/

Dan’s poster argues that a classic claim in cognitive psychology (that eogenous attention gradually accumulates at a cued location) is probably wrong, and instead argues that exogenous attention is fully deployed by at least 30ms after cue onset  https://osf.io/tn3gz/

Finally, if you’re interested in social attention you should check out Dr Emma Morgan’s poster showing how autistic traits modulate the effects of mental state attribution on gaze cueing /https://osf.io/ud2yz/.

Hope you enjoy our posters and talks, we’ll be available for discussion via twitter if you have any questions: @AttentionLab, @SoazigCasteau, @SiobhanMcateer4

Cortex Special Issue: Call for Papers

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We’re delighted to announce that the journal “Cortex” has agreed to host a special issue based around the Symposium on “Cognitive & Motor Processes in Visual Attention” we hosted in Durham earlier this year! The SI will be edited by Dan, Soazig, Stefan and Thomas and is a really exciting opportunity to share work on the relationship between cognition and motor control. The call for papers and SI description is below and is available on the Cortex website . The submission portal will open on 15th February and close on 15th July.

The ability to orient attention in space is fundamental to our ability to successfully interact with our environment, as demonstrated by the profound problems experienced by patients with neuropsychological deficits of attention. Understanding the mechanisms of attentional orienting has been central question in cognitive neuropsychology, and although much progress has been made some important questions remain unanswered. For example, there is broad agreement that there is some relationship between the motor processes involved in the control of eye-movements and the cognitive processes involved in attentional selection. However, the precise nature of this relationship remains controversial, with some scholars arguing for an almost complete functional overlap, others arguing for complete functional dissociation and a variety of views between these poles. Furthermore, the interplay between visuospatial working memory, visuospatial attention and oculomotor control is not well understood, despite great progress in understanding the neural and cognitive mechanisms of each individual processes. Finally, it is not clear to what extent the theoretical advances in understanding the interactions between spatial attention and oculomotor control can be used inform the development of new therapies for neuropsychological disorders such as hemianopia and neglect. This special issue will bring together empirical and review articles that offer new insights into the functional role of attentional and motor systems in cognitive processes, and/or seek to apply the principles that govern the relationship between attention, memory and motor control to solving applied questions relating to the clinical diagnosis and rehabilitation of neuropsychological disorders.

 

New lab member Siobhan McAteer arrives!

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We’re delighted to welcome Siobhan McAteer to the lab! Siobhan arrives from Oxford, where she has just completed an MSc in Psychological Research. Her project “How do we store spatial working memories?” will examine the role of the eye movement system in spatial working memory with a view to applying resource theories of visual short-term memory (e.g. Bays & Husain, 2008) to spatial working memory.  Siobhan’s research is supported by an ESRC NINEDTP doctoral scholarship and she will be 2nd supervised by Dr Anthony McGregor. Welcome (back) to Durham Siobhan!

Federation of European Neuropsychology Societies 2019: Conference Report

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In my final conference of a busy summer I attended the Federation of European Neuropsychology Societies (FESN) which took place from 5th -7th September in Milan. I arrived on the 4th and stayed in the conference hotel “Palazzo Delle Stellene” which was a converted monastery right beside the church that houses Michelangelo’s Last Supper. The hotel was very atmospheric, although the plumbing was a bit noisy and there was a long queue for the single coffee machine at breakfast! The talks on the first day didn’t start until lunchtime, so after breakfast I strolled down to the Piazza del Duomo to take the obligatory selfie at both ends of the square for use in lectures on neglect 😉 .

Looking across the Piazza Del Duomo from the steps of the Duomo

The conference itself was hosted in the Universita Cattolica del Sacro Coure, which is  housed in the cloisters of the beautiful old monastery of Sant’Ambrogio. The main auditorium (Aula Magna) was richly decorated, as was the Crypt, which held some of the other sessions. This grandeur did come at a cost, as the rooms tended to be long and narrow which wasn’t brilliant for their acoustics and meant it could be hard to read detail on some slides. The opening address was an interesting and unusually political appeal to science administrators and governments to protect researchers doing animal work. It was followed by a keynote from Emrah Duzel explaining the functional anatomy of episodic memory loss in Alzhiemers disease, then lunch in the grounds. After lunch I attended the ‘Body in the Brain’ symposium, which discussed recent developments in the understanding of embodiment and then an excellent session on networks of attentional control chaired by Alfredo Spanga. My main take homes from this session were that the old idea that the right hemisphere is specialised for spatial attention has really stood the test of time, but also that people in this field really neglect the role of the oculomotor system in visuospatial attention.  

Looking along the cloisters

Speaking of attention and eye-movements, my talk was on ‘Associations and dissociations between oculomotor readiness and covert attention’ and was part of a Colloquium organised by Thomas Schenk. As the talks was only 15 mins I covered our the studies on attention within and beyond the range of eye movements we recently published in Cortex (Casteau & Smith 2018) and only touched on the broader literature, which we reviewed in Casteau & Smith (2019). I was more nervy than usual about this talk, partly because it was in Italy, which I think of as the home of Premotor theory, and partly because I knew several of my old bosses (Thomas and Steve Jackson) would be there and I wanted to put on a good show. Unfortunately I was last in the evening session so attendance was a wee bit sparse, but in the end I think it went quite well, and I got some good questions from Steve and Janet Bultitude afterwards. The other speakers were Ana Chica, who gave a very nice talk on the motoric and perceptual effects of Inhibition of Return, Christian Poth who demonstrated that there is some trans-saccadic competition between unattended objects and Karin Ludwig, who reported experiments showing that visual scanning training can bias attention in healthy participants. In the following days I attended some fascinating talks on Neglect in the symposium organed by Monika Harvey and saw a superb keynote from Carlo Miniussi on the challenges of applying neurostimulation techniques such as tDCS to neurorehabilitation. Masud Husain also gave an excellent talk on apathy, showing that in many cases the core problem is that patients are not motivated by outcomes with high rewards. I also attended the poster sessions, but as these were only an hour long and over lunch I didn’t see as many as I would have liked. There was some excellent work, and I particularly enjoyed Monika Halika’s poster “Disputing neglect-like symptoms in unilateral chronic pain” which showed there is no unilateral attentional bias in chronic pain patients with upper limb pain using a TOJ task. 

I had not been to FESN before and I thought there were some interesting comparisons between it and ECEM, which Soazig & I had attended earlier in the summer (you can read a report here). The

The Aula Magna, viewed from the stage. There were a few more people by the time my talk started!

meetings felt of a similar size, with around 400-500 delegates and this gave them both a feeling of intimacy and offered excellent opportunities for catching up with friends and colleagues and meeting new people. If anything FESN offered me more opportunities for ‘networking’ (as opposed to gossiping with old friends). A nice example of this was probably the couple of hours I spent in the company of Thomas and Sergio Della Salla, listening to them discuss the state of academic publishing. It was interesting to hear a perspective from ‘inside’ the industry (Thomas is former section editor for Neuropsychologia and Sergio the EiC of Cortex). It was also a salutatory lesson in the power of personal contact; for some time I’ve harboured an ambition to edit a special issue but not really known how to go about it. I tentatively mentioned this to Sergio, only to have him beckon seductively while crooning ‘send it to me…’. So, watch this space!  The conference registration fee was quite high at 400 euro for early, non-members, but as with ECEM this included excellent plentiful lunches and a welcome reception. Although the meeting was intimate it felt a bit more formal than ECEM, with many delegates adopting a ‘smart causal’ look or even suits, despite the warm weather. The talks themselves also tended to have a more sober delivery, perhaps as Christian Poth suggested, because many of the delegates were also clinicians and were discussing research related to their own patients.

Overall I thought it was an excellent meeting with a very high standard of talk. The highlight was probably Miniussi’s talk on tDCS, although I was also very tickled when Radek Ptak approached Thomas and I saying “Hey! You’re the Premotor Theory guys!”. I would definitely consider attending FESN again and it would be an excellent forum to present the results from our more applied neuropsychological work on Attention & Memory in Progressive Supranuclear Palsy and Parkinson’s Disease (e.g. Smith & Archibald 2019) .

Casteau, S. & Smith, D.T. (2019). Associations and Dissociations between Oculomotor Readiness and Covert Attention. Vision 3(2): 17
Casteau, S. & Smith, D.T. (2018). Covert Attention Beyond the Range of Eye-movements: Evidence for a Dissociation between Exogenous and Endogenous orienting. Cortex

A commentary on “Visual attention is not limited to the oculomotor range” by Hanning, Szinte & Deubel (2019)

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We read with great interest the recent PNAS paper by Hanning and colleagues, in which they use a variant of Craighero et al’s Eye Abduction paradigm to test the proposal that exogenous covert attention is constrained by the oculomotor range (Smith & Schenk 2012; Casteau & Smith 2019). If you’re not familiar with the paradigm, figure A illustrates the setup. The idea is that by abducting the eye by ~35-40 degrees it is possible to present stimuli at locations that can be seen but cannot be reached with a saccadic eye-movement. This neat procedure decouples perception and oculomotor control, and in 2012 we showed that peripheral cues beyond the oculomotor range did not summon attention (Smith, Rorden & Schenk 2012).

In the Hanning version of the task participants are shown 4 channels of noise, 3 within the range of eye-movements and one beyond. One of the locations is cued for 50ms, and 100ms later a probe appears in one of the channels for 50ms. Participants must report the orientation of the probe with button press. People are really bad at this task, and accuracy is only above chance at the cued location. Critically, this attentional facilitation for the cued location is observed even when the cued channel is beyond the range of eye-movements, contrary to our previous findings. Hanning and colleagues argue this is problematic for premotor theory, and argue the data are more consistent with selection-for-action models like VAM. They conclude that covert, exogenous orienting of attention is not constrained by the range of eye-movements, contrary to our previous findings.

The paper is beautifully presented, the experiment is cleverly designed and on first inspection these data look clear cut. There can be no doubt that the peripheral cues are producing enhanced target detection. So, do we need to abandon our position that covert, exogenous orienting is dependent on oculomotor activation? Perhaps not yet. Hannings’ data are convincing, but as they note in their paper, there are considerable differences in the stimuli used in our lab (e.g. Smith et al., 2012, Casteau & Smith 2018), by Craighero et al., (2012) and by Michalczyk et al., (2018) that show an effect of eye-abduction on covert attention, and those used by Hanning and colleagues. One potentially crucial difference is the difficulty of the task. Hannings’ task is extremely difficult. In fact, it is impossible to accurately discriminate the target unless it is attended (See fig 2b: dprime is ~0 at all uncued locations – you can see the task for yourself here). To understand why this is a problem we need to first consider the rationale for using a non-predictive peripheral cueing task. The reason typically given is that a non-predictive cue gives the participant no incentive to endogenously attend to the cued location, so allows a ‘pure’ measure of exogenous attention. This rationale makes sense when the task is simple detection task or a speeded discrimination, because the participant detects the target regardless of whether or not it appears at the cued location, and the differences emerge in the speed of target detection. However, this rationale does not hold true when the task is so difficult that the target is never detected at uncued locations. Why? Because under these conditions the cue is highly informative from the perspective of the participant; they only ever perceive a target when they attend a cued location, and never detect targets at uncued locations (a similar issue is found in the change blindness literature- see Smith & Schenk 2010). It therefore makes complete sense for participants to adopt an attentional set of ‘endogenously attend cued location’ in order to correctly perform the task. We know that endogenous shifts of attention can be observed at short SOAs, for example in Muller & Rabbit (1989) seminal study there is a beneficial effect of endogenous attention at 100ms SOA, and Tipples (2002) has shown a similar effect for arrows. It therefore seems likely that the peripheral cue used by Hanning et al., engaged both endogenous and exogenous attention, and it was the endogenous component of attention that produced the attentional benefit. If participants are endogenously attending the cued location, the results are in fact in exact accordance with our previous findings and those of Klein and colleagues (1980;1994), which were that endogenous orienting is independent of oculomotor control. A less critical, but still noteworthy issue is that the sample is rather small (n=6 in the critical covert attention task). In contrast, papers showing impaired exogenous attention beyond the oculomotor range tend to have larger samples (N= ~20-25), so there is also a risk that this study was somewhat underpowered to detect the interaction of interest. Hanning et al., also make the valid point that previous studies using eye-abduction did not establish the range of eye-movements for their participants. However, in our 2018 paper we measured each participants own oculomotor range, and again showed a selective deficit for covert exogenous attention at locations beyond the range of eye-movements when the eye was centred in its orbit .

To briefly summarize, Hanning et al., show that a peripheral cue produces attentional facilitation beyond the EOMR. The evidence for this effect is very clear, and we do not dispute that participants did indeed covertly orient to the cued location. However, we do dispute the claim that this shift of attention is exogenous in nature. Rather, we believe it is more likely that participants endogenously oriented to the peripheral cue because it was the only way to successful complete the task, and that the improved performance at the cued location is caused by this endogenous shift of attention. We agree with the conclusion that the data are problematic for premotor theory, but only because they show that endogenous orienting is possible to locations that cannot become the goal of a saccade.

We asked Hanning & colleagues if they would like to reply to our comment, and will add it here ASAP if they do. Nina will be joining us in Durham for our workshop and we’re looking forward to some lively discussions! (there are still some places if you fancy joining us)

 

References

  • Casteau, S.; Smith, D.T. Covert attention beyond the range of eye-movements: Evidence for a dissociation between exogenous and endogenous orienting. Cortex [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
  • Casteau, S & Smith, D.T. (2019). Associations and Dissociations between Oculomotor Readiness and Covert Attention. Vision 3: 17.
  • Craighero, L.; Nascimben, M.; Fadiga, L. Eye position affects orienting of visuospatial attention. Biol.2004, 14, 331–333. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
  • Hanning, N., Szinte, M,. & Deubel H. Visual attention is not limited to the oculomotor range. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2019, 116 (19) 9665-9670; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1813465116
  • Klein, R.M. Does oculomotor readiness mediate cognitive control of visual attention? Perform. 1980, 8, 259–276. [Google Scholar]
  • Klein, R.M.; Pontefract, A. Does Oculomotor Readiness Mediate Cognitive Control of Visual Attention? Revisited! In Attention and performance XV: Conscious and Nonconscious Information Processing; UmiltĂ , C., Moscovitch, M., Eds.; The MIT Press: Cambrige, MA, USA, 1994; pp. 333–350. [Google Scholar]
  • Smith, D.T.; Schenk, T. The Premotor theory of attention: Time to move on? Neuropsychologia 2012, 50, 1104–1114. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
  • Michalczyk, L.; Paszulewicz, J.; Bielas, J.; Wolski, P. Is saccade preparation required for inhibition of return (IOR)? Lett. 2018, 665, 13–17. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed]
  • Smith DT & Schenk, T. (2010). Inhibition of return exaggerates change blindness. Quarterly Journal Of Experimental Psychology 63(11): 2231-2238.
  • Smith, D.T. Smith, D.T.; Schenk, T.; Rorden, C. Saccade preparation is required for exogenous attention but not endogenous attention or IOR. Exp. Psychol Hum. Percept. Perform. 2012, 38, 1438–1447. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed]

 

Daniel T. Smith & Soazig Casteau,

Dept of Psychology, Durham University UK