Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

College Students' Relationship With Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder And Learning Accommodations At The University Of Nebraska-Lincoln, Brianna Danehey, Kim Hansen Dr., Chelsea Witt Dr.

Honors Theses

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) can provide many challenges for college students due to difficulties focusing, multi-tasking, and staying organized. Colleges are required to offer academic accommodations to students with disabilities in an attempt to provide students with an equitable learning environment. However, accommodations may be ineffective if they are highly unattainable, unused by the student once granted, or hindered by university faculty.

The objective of this study was to identify barriers to receiving effective and beneficial academic accommodations for individuals with ADHD at the University level and to provide insight into college students' knowledge and relationships relating to the …

Using Legos® In Research Facilitation: An Advanced Scripted Research Method, Samuel W. Root

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Advance Publication Archive

Transpersonal research methods can help individuals access useful information and material that typically reside out of conscious awareness. The playful activity of LEGO® block-building can be adapted for research purposes and used to overcome research impasses, for example. This paper presents a novel transpersonal LEGO® building process for facilitation in each of the four major phases of research. Readers are provided with a 6-step script that takes between 30 minutes and 1 hour to complete. Steps include: Prepare to Exercise; Set Intentions; Build While Intending Solution; Appreciate/Take In; Project and Actively Imagine; and Reflect and Ease Out. Future studies could …

Eye Movement And Pupil Measures: A Review, Bhanuka Mahanama, Yasith Jayawardana, Sundararaman Rengarajan, Gavindya Jayawardena, Leanne Chukoskie, Joseph Snider, Sampath Jayarathna

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Our subjective visual experiences involve complex interaction between our eyes, our brain, and the surrounding world. It gives us the sense of sight, color, stereopsis, distance, pattern recognition, motor coordination, and more. The increasing ubiquity of gaze-aware technology brings with it the ability to track gaze and pupil measures with varying degrees of fidelity. With this in mind, a review that considers the various gaze measures becomes increasingly relevant, especially considering our ability to make sense of these signals given different spatio-temporal sampling capacities. In this paper, we selectively review prior work on eye movements and pupil measures. We first …

Physiological Measurements For Real-Time Fatigue Monitoring In Train Drivers: Review Of The State Of The Art And Reframing The Problem, Bojana Bjegojevic, Maria Chiara Leva, Nora Balfe, Sam D. Cromie, Luca Longo

Conference papers

The impact of fatigue on train drivers is one of the most important safety-critical issues in rail. It affects drivers’ performance, significantly contributing to railway incidents and accidents. To address the issue of real-time fatigue detection in drivers, most reliable and applicable psychophysiological indicators of fatigue need to be identified. Hence, this paper aims to examine and present the current state of the art in physiological measures for real-time fatigue monitoring that could be applied in the train driving context. Three groups of such measures are identified: EEG, eye-tracking and heart-rate measures. This is the first paper to provide the …

Pupil Size Is Modulated By The Size Of Equal-Luminance Gratings, Jie Gao, Athena Ko, Yoshiko Yabe, Melvyn A. Goodale, Juan Chen

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

© 2020 The Authors. Pupil size changes with light. For this reason, researchers studying the effect of attention, contextual processing, and arousal on the pupillary response have matched the mean luminance of their stimuli across conditions to eliminate the contribution of differences in light levels. Here, we argue that the match of mean luminance is not enough. In Experiment 1, we presented a circular sinewave grating on a gray background for 2 seconds. The area of the grating could be 3°, 6°, or 9°. The mean luminance of each grating was equal to the luminance of the gray background, such …

Impaired Object-Location Learning And Recognition Memory But Enhanced Sustained Attention In M2 Muscarinic Receptor-Deficient Mice, Carola Romberg, Susan Bartko, Jürgen Wess, Lisa M. Saksida, Timothy J. Bussey

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

© 2018, The Author(s). Rationale: Muscarinic acetylcholine receptors are known to play key roles in mediating cognitive processes, and impaired muscarinic cholinergic neurotransmission is associated with normal ageing processes and Alzheimer’s disease. However, the specific contributions of the individual muscarinic receptor subtypes (M1–M5) to cognition are presently not well understood. Objectives: The aim of this study was to investigate the contribution of M2-type muscarinic receptor signalling to sustained attention, executive control and learning and memory. Methods: M2 receptor-deficient (M2−/−) mice were tested on a touchscreen-operated task battery testing visual discrimination, behavioural flexibility, object-location associative learning, attention and response control. Spontaneous …

Seeing The Forest And The Trees: Default Local Processing In Individuals With High Autistic Traits Does Not Come At The Expense Of Global Attention., Ryan A Stevenson, Sol Z Sun, Naomi Hazlett, Jonathan S Cant, Morgan D Barense, Susanne Ferber

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Atypical sensory perception is one of the most ubiquitous symptoms of autism, including a tendency towards a local-processing bias. We investigated whether local-processing biases were associated with global-processing impairments on a global/local attentional-scope paradigm in conjunction with a composite-face task. Behavioural results were related to individuals' levels of autistic traits, specifically the Attention to Detail subscale of the Autism Quotient, and the Sensory Profile Questionnaire. Individuals showing high rates of Attention to Detail were more susceptible to global attentional-scope manipulations, suggesting that local-processing biases associated with Attention to Detail do not come at the cost of a global-processing deficit, but …

Transient Pupil Dilation After Subsaccadic Microstimulation Of Primate Frontal Eye Fields., Sebastian J Lehmann, Brian D Corneil

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

UNLABELLED: Pupillometry provides a simple and noninvasive index for a variety of cognitive processes, including perception, attention, task consolidation, learning, and memory. The neural substrates by which such cognitive processes influence pupil diameter remain somewhat unclear, although cortical inputs to the locus coeruleus mediating arousal are likely involved. Changes in pupil diameter also accompany covert orienting; hence the oculomotor system may provide an alternative substrate for cognitive influences on pupil diameter. Here, we show that low-level electrical microstimulation of the primate frontal eye fields (FEFs), a cortical component of the oculomotor system strongly connected to the intermediate layers of the …

Standardized Patient Encounters Periodic Versus Postencounter Evaluation Of Nontechnical Clinical Performance, T. Robert Turner, Mark W. Scerbo, Gayle A. Gliva-Mcconvey, Amelia M. Wallace

Psychology Faculty Publications

Introduction: Standardized patients are a beneficial component of modern healthcare education and training, but few studies have explored cognitive factors potentially impacting clinical skills assessment during standardized patient encounters. This study examined the impact of a periodic (vs. traditional postencounter) evaluation approach and the appearance of critical verbal and nonverbal behaviors throughout a standardized patient encounter on scoring accuracy in a video-based scenario.

Methods: Forty-nine standardized patients scored either periodically or at only 1 point in time (postencounter) a healthcare provider's verbal and nonverbal clinical performance during a videotaped standardized patient encounter. The healthcare provider portrayed in this study was …

Contemplating Mindfulness At Work: An Integrative Review, Christopher Lyddy, Darren J. Good, Theresa M. Glomb, Joyce E. Bono, Kirk W. Brown, Michelle K. Duffy, Ruth A. Baer, Judson A. Brewer, Sara W. Lazar

School of Business Faculty Publications

Mindfulness research activity is surging within organizational science. Emerging evidence across multiple fields suggests that mindfulness is fundamentally connected to many aspects of workplace functioning, but this knowledge base has not been systematically integrated to date. This review coalesces the burgeoning body of mindfulness scholarship into a framework to guide mainstream management research investigating a broad range of constructs. The framework identifies how mindfulness influences attention, with downstream effects on functional domains of cognition, emotion, behavior, and physiology. Ultimately, these domains impact key workplace outcomes, including performance, relationships, and well-being. Consideration of the evidence on mindfulness at work stimulates important …

Belief About Nicotine Selectively Modulates Value And Reward Prediction Error Signals In Smokers, Xiaosi Gu, Terry Lohrenz, Ramiro Salas, Philip R. Baldwin, Alireza Soltani

Dartmouth Scholarship

Little is known about how prior beliefs impact biophysically described processes in the presence of neuroactive drugs, which presents a profound challenge to the understanding of the mechanisms and treatments of addiction. We engineered smokers' prior beliefs about the presence of nicotine in a cigarette smoked before a functional magnetic resonance imaging session where subjects carried out a sequential choice task. Using a model-based approach, we show that smokers' beliefs about nicotine specifically modulated learning signals (value and reward prediction error) defined by a computational model of mesolimbic dopamine systems. Belief of "no nicotine in cigarette" (compared with "nicotine in …

Attentional Filtering Of Visual Information By Neuronal Ensembles In The Primate Lateral Prefrontal Cortex., Sébastien Tremblay, Florian Pieper, Adam Sachs, Julio Martinez-Trujillo

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

The activity of neurons in the primate lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) is strongly modulated by visual attention. Such a modulation has mostly been documented by averaging the activity of independently recorded neurons over repeated experimental trials. However, in realistic settings, ensembles of simultaneously active LPFC neurons must generate attentional signals on a single-trial basis, despite the individual and correlated variability of neuronal responses. Whether, under these circumstances, the LPFC can reliably generate attentional signals is unclear. Here, we show that the simultaneous activity of neuronal ensembles in the primate LPFC can be reliably decoded to predict the allocation of attention …

Facilitated Detection Of Social Cues Conveyed By Familiar Faces, Matteo Visconti Di Oleggio Castello, J. Swaroop Guntupalli, Hua Yang, M. Ida Gobbini

Dartmouth Scholarship

Recognition of the identity of familiar faces in conditions with poor visibility or over large changes in head angle, lighting and partial occlusion is far more accurate than recognition of unfamiliar faces in similar conditions. Here we used a visual search paradigm to test if one class of social cues transmitted by faces—direction of another’s attention as conveyed by gaze direction and head orientation—is perceived more rapidly in personally familiar faces than in unfamiliar faces. We found a strong effect of familiarity on the detection of these social cues, suggesting that the times to process these signals in familiar faces …

Sharp Emergence Of Feature-Selective Sustained Activity Along The Dorsal Visual Pathway., Diego Mendoza-Halliday, Santiago Torres, Julio C Martinez-Trujillo

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Sustained activity encoding visual working memory representations has been observed in several cortical areas of primates. Where along the visual pathways this activity emerges remains unknown. Here we show in macaques that sustained spiking activity encoding memorized visual motion directions is absent in direction-selective neurons in early visual area middle temporal (MT). However, it is robustly present immediately downstream, in multimodal association area medial superior temporal (MST), as well as and in the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC). This sharp emergence of sustained activity along the dorsal visual pathway suggests a functional boundary between early visual areas, which encode sensory inputs, …

A Dedicated Binding Mechanism For The Visual Control Of Movement., Alexandra Reichenbach, David W Franklin, Peter Zatka-Haas, Jörn Diedrichsen

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

The human motor system is remarkably proficient in the online control of visually guided movements, adjusting to changes in the visual scene within 100 ms [1-3]. This is achieved through a set of highly automatic processes [4] translating visual information into representations suitable for motor control [5, 6]. For this to be accomplished, visual information pertaining to target and hand need to be identified and linked to the appropriate internal representations during the movement. Meanwhile, other visual information must be filtered out, which is especially demanding in visually cluttered natural environments. If selection of relevant sensory information for online control …

The Effect Of Robot-Child Interactions On Social Attention And Verbalization Patterns Of Typically Developing Children And Children With Autism Between 4 And 8 Years, Sudha Srinivasan, Anjana Bhat

Open Access Author Fund Awardees' Articles

Background: There is anecdotal evidence for the use of robots to facilitate prosocial behaviors such as joint attention and verbalization in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs). However, there have been no normative data in typically developing children to evaluate the effects of robot-child interactions on social and communication skills. Objectives: The aim of our study was to evaluate the changes in social attention and verbalization skills of 15 typically developing (TD) children, using a structured 8-session imitation protocol within a robot-adult-child context. We further extended this imitation protocol to two children with ASDs. Methods: Pretest, session1, session 4, session …

Specific Contributions Of Ventromedial, Anterior Cingulate, And Lateral Prefrontal Cortex For Attentional Selection And Stimulus Valuation., Daniel Kaping, Martin Vinck, R Matthew Hutchison, Stefan Everling, Thilo Womelsdorf

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Attentional control ensures that neuronal processes prioritize the most relevant stimulus in a given environment. Controlling which stimulus is attended thus originates from neurons encoding the relevance of stimuli, i.e. their expected value, in hand with neurons encoding contextual information about stimulus locations, features, and rules that guide the conditional allocation of attention. Here, we examined how these distinct processes are encoded and integrated in macaque prefrontal cortex (PFC) by mapping their functional topographies at the time of attentional stimulus selection. We find confined clusters of neurons in ventromedial PFC (vmPFC) that predominantly convey stimulus valuation information during attention shifts. …

Deficits In Attention To Emotional Stimuli Distinguish Youth With Severe Mood Dysregulation From Youth With Bipolar Disorder., Brendan A Rich, Melissa A Brotman, Daniel P Dickstein, Derek G V Mitchell, R James R Blair, Ellen Leibenluft

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Studying attention in the context of emotional stimuli may aid in differentiating pediatric bipolar disorder (BD) from severe mood dysregulation (SMD). SMD is characterized by chronic irritability, arousal, and hyper-reactivity; SMD youth frequently receive a BD diagnosis although they do not meet DSM-IV criteria for BD because they lack manic episodes. We compared 57 BD (14.4 +/- 2.9 years old, 56% male), 41 SMD (12.6 +/- 2.6 years old, 66% male), and 33 control subjects (13.7 +/- 2.5 years old, 52% male) using the Emotional Interrupt task, which examines how attention is impacted by positive, negative, or neutral distracters. We …

Motor Output Evoked By Subsaccadic Stimulation Of Primate Frontal Eye Fields., Brian D Corneil, James K Elsley, Benjamin Nagy, Sharon L Cushing

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

In addition to its role in shifting the line of sight, the oculomotor system is also involved in the covert orienting of visuospatial attention. Causal evidence supporting this premotor theory of attention, or oculomotor readiness hypothesis, comes from the effect of subsaccadic threshold stimulation of the oculomotor system on behavior and neural activity in the absence of evoked saccades, which parallels the effects of covert attention. Here, by recording neck-muscle activity from monkeys and systematically titrating the level of stimulation current delivered to the frontal eye fields (FEF), we show that such subsaccadic stimulation is not divorced from immediate motor …

Dietary Pufa Intakes In Children With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Symptoms, Ka-Hung Ng, Barbara Meyer, Lauren Reece, Natalie Sinn

Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences - Papers (Archive)

Research has shown associations between attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and erythrocyte long-chain n-3 PUFA (LC n-3 PUFA) levels, with limited evidence for dietary LC n-3 PUFA intake and ADHD. The aims of the present study were to assess dietary PUFA intakes and food sources in children with ADHD, to compare these intakes to previously published Australian National Nutrition Survey (NNS) data and determine any relationships between intakes and ADHD symptoms. Eighty-six 3-d-weighed food records (FR) were analysed from children with ADHD. The median (interquartile range) daily intakes of fatty acids (mg/d) were: linoleic acid (18 : 2n-6), 7797 (6240–12 333); arachidonic …

Attention To Configural Information In Change Detection For Faces, Simone K. Favelle, Darren Burke

Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences - Papers (Archive)

In recent research the change-detection paradigm has been used along with cueing manipulations to show that more attention is allocated to the upper than lower facial region, and that this attentional allocation is disrupted by inversion. We report two experiments the object of which was to investigate how the type of information changed might be a factor in these findings by explicitly comparing the role of attention in detecting change to information thought to be special to faces (second-order relations) with information that is more useful for basic-level object discrimination (first-order relations). Results suggest that attention is automatically directed to …

Event-Related Potentials During An Emotional Stroop Task, Susan J. Thomas, Stuart J. Johnstone, Craig J. Gonsalvez

Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences - Papers (Archive)

Emotional Stroop tasks have gained wide interest in scientific literature in the last two decades. Although no direct measure of attention is employed, these studies infer the presence of preferential processing of threatening information based on reaction time (RT) impairment in a competing task. Because event-related potential (ERP) measures are sensitive to both the extent (amplitude) and speed (latency) of cerebral processing, they are valuable tools with which to examine more directly the claim that threatening stimuli are associated with enhanced attention. Twenty-two students rated a pool of words to identify those that were personally disturbing. Two word types (threat …

The Role Of Attention In Processing Configural And Shape Information In 3d Novel Objects, Simone K. Favelle, Stephen Palmisano, Darren Burke, William G. Hayward

Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences - Papers (Archive)

Recent research suggests that there is an advantage for processing configural information in scenes and objects. The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which attention may account for this configural advantage. In Experiment 1, we found that cueing the location of change in single object displays improved detection performance for both configural and shape changes, yet cueing attention away from the location of change was detrimental only for shape change detection. A configural advantage was present for each cueing condition. Experiments 2A and 2B examined whether the configural advantage persisted in conditions where attention was distributed …

A Contralateral Preference In The Lateral Occipital Area: Sensory And Attentional Mechanisms., Matthias Niemeier, Herbert C Goltz, Anil Kuchinad, Douglas B Tweed, Tutis Vilis

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Here we examined the level of the lateral occipital (LO) area within the processing stream of the ventral visual cortex. An important determinant of an area's level of processing is whether it codes visual elements on both sides of the visual field, as do higher visual areas, or prefers those in the contralateral visual field, as do early visual areas. The former would suggest that LO, on one side, combines bilateral visual elements into a whole, while the latter suggests that it codes only the parts of forms. We showed that LO has a relative preference for visual objects in …

Triple Dissociation Of Anterior Cingulate, Posterior Cingulate, And Medial Frontal Cortices On Visual Discrimination Tasks Using A Touchscreen Testing Procedure For The Rat., T J Bussey, J L Muir, B J Everitt, T W Robbins

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Four experiments examined effects of quinolinic acid-induced lesions of the anterior cingulate, posterior cingulate, and medial frontal cortices on tests of visual discrimination learning, using a new "touchscreen" testing method for rats. Anterior cingulate cortex lesions impaired acquisition of an 8-pair concurrent discrimination task, whereas posterior cingulate cortex lesions facilitated learning but selectively impaired the late stages of acquisition of a visuospatial conditional discrimination. Medial frontal cortex lesions selectively impaired reversal learning when stimuli were difficult to discriminate; lesions of anterior and posterior cingulate cortex had no effect. These results suggest roles for the anterior cingulate, posterior cingulate, and medial …

A Developmental Analysis Of Attentional Processes In Educabley Mentally Retarded And Normally Developing Children, Ronald T. Brown

Integrated Health Sciences Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.