Talk:Attentional control

OUTLINE
Definition / Basics


 * Definition of Attention: “The state of selectively processing simultaneous sources of information”


 * Attention control refers to an individual’s capacity to choose what they ignore and what they pay attention to.


 * Similar terms: endogenous attention, executive attention


 * Mainly mediated by the frontal areas of the brain, including the anterior cingulate cortex.


 * Related to working memory (and other executive functions).

Development

Infancy


 * How attention control develops?!

Childhood


 * 1. How it changes?!

Adulthood?!


 * Any changes / problems associated with adulthood?

How is Attention Directed?

Pulvinar Nucleus of the Thalamus?

Attention and Eye movements


 * Frontal eye field (FEFs)


 * Direct connections with areas V2, V3, V4, MT and parietal cortex (all known to be influenced by attention


 * FEF stimulation mimics physiological and behavioral effects of attention

Physiological Effects of Attention


 * fMRI imaging of attention to location


 * Enhancements in detection and reaction time are selective for spatial location


 * Brain activity patterns shift retinotopically

PET imaging of attention to features


 * Visual attention can be moved independently of eye position


 * Used to indicate where neurons activate for different visual patterns


 * Different areas of the cortex are involved with different types of stimuli (shape, color, motion)

Parietal Cortex

Receptive Field changes in area V4

Abnormal Development?!


 * ADD / ADHD


 * Autism


 * Anxiety


 * Down Syndrome


 * Memory? / any problems with this?

Treatment


 * The treatment section will discuss comorbidity, as many individuals with attentional control issues also experience other difficulties. While treatment for this condition is not a widely popular research topic, this section will briefly review what is currently available for those affected; discussing the drugs that stimulate targeted receptors. It will state side effects of the treatment and how the treatment specifically targets the problem areas. It will also look at future research, such as the idea that the circuitry model will guide treatment development of deficits in attentional control, and the use of fMRI and electrophysiological recording techniques will increase. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Reva m18 (talk • contribs) 17:59, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Instructor comment
Group, this is a wonderfully ambitious outline, and I'm really glad to see that you're thinking about how to incorporate your additions into the organization of the existing page. While I'm excited that your group is willing to tackle all this, I'm also concerned that what you have too much to handle within the time frame of this project. Below are specific recommendations for you to consider:
 * Development section - you don't need an Adulthood section unless you find strong secondary references for this
 * Everything from FEF to Receptive Field changes in area V4 may be too detailed for Wikipedia. I encourage you to read and learn about all this. But after that, you need to think about how to communicate the overall points to a general audience. It won't be possible to avoid technical terms, but describe them in ways that are accurate yet still not too cumbersome for the general public to read.
 * I like your section on Abnormal Development?!. Be sure to see what's already on the pages of these disorders, and remember you want to write about known facts that have consensus agreement within the scientific community. This section can potentially be a lot of work. I'll leave it up to you to determine which of these disorders you want to research (i.e., it would be ok if you want to just focus on one. The one that is most likely to have much research on attentional control is ADHD).
 * Treatment section - I'm not sure that you'll be able to find evidence-based treatment for attentional control. Consider excluding this section
 * Regarding citations below, avoid primary sources. There are plenty of secondary resources out there, and they provide complex enough reading. Aim to cite only secondary references in your article.
 * Excellent job so far. Keep up the good work!

Comments from Smallman12q

 * Add more wikilinks such as for fMRI.
 * The role of health disparities in creating different levels of attentional control.
 * Add how attentional control can be influenced (increased/reduced) by certain behaviors and drugs.

This is pretty good so far. Smallman12q (talk) 23:04, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Comments from Justine28
I think it would be useful to give a little definition to the "endogenous attention or executive attention" in the introduction, because although there are wikilinks for each, I think there is room to expand on those and would give a clearer understanding to the introduction, as far as from my standpoint when reading it. I really liked the breakdown of the development section. I like the idea that user smallman12q said about influencing attention control, especially since you mention the role attention plays in ADHD and abnormal devlopment. I think its off to a great start, and I think your core ideas are on point. (Justine28 (talk) 02:34, 30 October 2012 (UTC))

Comments from narmstrong484

 * The article seems very well put together and the sections follow logically
 * Maybe the sections on development can be under one heading, and the subsections like infancy and childhood under subheadings.
 * Maybe more on disruptions to proper attention, from drugs or injuries.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Narmstrong484 (talk • contribs) 05:40, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Comments from dizeob3
I am very interested in the information in this article. The setup and divided sections eliminate confusion while reading. The section on infancy has great background information, but I do get distracted at certain points. "Similarily" and "This is shown,for example.." seem to just be repeating yourself - eliminate the extra words. I really enjoy the portion on ADHD in the child development. I believe that the final sentence (statistic) is not at its full potential. I suggest adding a couple of sentences to relate it better. Dizeob3 (talk) 13:43, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Comments from jendombeck
You guys have put a lot of great information into this article. I didn't get a chance to see the article before but the additions are great. Some extra wiki links would be nice and a few times I felt that words were repeated. I felt overall the organization was very clear and easy to follow. Great job so far! jendombeck (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 17:05, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Response to Feedback
Thanks for all the feedback, we tried to address it as best we could! I worked on the Visual Attention section 192.175.20.20 (talk) 20:26, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

Instructor's feedback
Group, very nice job so far! Some general comments first: 1) You have nice references, but most are primary sources instead of secondary sources. For sections such as Research and Relevance to mental illness, try to find secondary sources of info. 2) Your citations are not correctly formatted. Please see this link for how to cite one reference multiple times in an article. Below are comments about specific sections: Keep up your excellent work! Neuropsychprof (talk) 05:45, 5 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Research: Posner & Peterson were NOT the first ones to propose that there is an attentional system composing of multiple parts. Delete this part. The rest of the paragraph is good.
 * Relevance to mental illness: Only the first word of each heading is capitalized. Define AC before using acronym. I like this section.
 * Development - Childhood: The section on ADHD would fit better under the Relevance to mental illness section. The last 2 sentences on ADHD may not be relevant to this article. Provide wikilink to the ADHD article for readers who would like more info.
 * Development - Abnormal development: This section should be merged with the Relevance to mental illness section.
 * Visual attentional control: I like this section. You have excellent secondary sources for this section. Perhaps a sentence about how there's more research on visual attentional control than other modalities (e.g., auditory) would help explain the absence of other modalities? The writing in this section needs to be refined. The politically correct term is "participants" instead of "subjects". Instead of "The fMRI images show...", it should be "fMRI findings show..." Please explain perceptual and cognitive load a bit more. In this paragraph, you mean "affect" not "effect".
 * Long-term significance: I don't think this group wrote this section; however, this section needs some work, so I recommend you gals try to refine it. For example, the heading "Theoretical controversies" seems more appropriate. There is certainly no need for a subheading under the primary heading because there is not two or more subsections.

Student edits to begin
Greta Munger (talk) 15:26, 17 April 2014 (UTC)

Davidson PSY 402 Project

 * This is a general outline of what I will be adding to the page. Some of the information will be added to existing headings, but I will also add a couple new headings.
 * I wasn't sure if I needed to use the reference function on the talk page so I just included my regular citations at the end (in the order they appear in the outline).

OUTLINE
Attentional Control and Performance
 * Pashler, Johnston, and Ruthruff (2001)
 * Voluntary mode: top down approach where attention is shifted according to high-level cognitive processes
 * Reflexive mode: bottom up approach where attention shifts involuntarily based on a stimuli’s attention attracting properties
 * Miyake, Friedman, & Emerson et al (2000) Secondary source: Eyenck et al (2007)
 * Inhibition function: prevents task-irrelevant stimuli and responses from disrupting performance
 * Shifting function: used to allocate attention in a flexible and optimal way to the task stimuli that are currently most relevant
 * Updating function: used to update and monitor the information currently within working memory
 * Eysenck & Derakshan (2011)
 * Overarching assumption: anxiety impairs attentional control (the three ways are the three hypotheses as to how)
 * Eysenck et al (2007)
 * Define attentional control theory and what it is comprised of
 * Approach to anxiety and cognition, specifically attentional control in the context of anxiety and cognitive performance
 * The basic assumption with this theory is that the effects of anxiety on attentional control are key to understanding the relationship between anxiety and performance
 * In general, anxiety inhibits attentional control on a specific task by impairing processing efficiency.

Relevance to Mental Illness
 * Schoorl et al (2014)
 * Attention problems are a common characteristic of anxiety disorders like PTSD.
 * Attentional bias causes a person to preferentially process emotionally negative information over emotionally positive information.
 * Participants were selected after being measured on scales for PTSD, anxiety proneness, attentional control, and attentional bias.
 * Results indicated attentional control was inversely related to attentional bias
 * PTSD patients with higher attentional control exhibited less attentional bias.
 * Basically, individual differences in attentional control had an effect on anxiety problems in PTSD.
 * Fan et al (2002)
 * build off of what is already on wikipedia
 * Trying to develop a behavioral task that will incorporate the three networks and to see if and how they relate to each other.
 * Goal: involve all three networks in the measure, obtain efficiency measures of the three networks, and have the design be simple enough to obtain data from children, patients, and animals

Mindfulness
 * Anderson et al (2007)
 * Participants did tasks of sustained attention, inhibition, switching, and object detection. These tasks were done before and after an 8 week Mindfulness based stress reduction course (MBSR), and were compared to a control group
 * The results indicated no significant differences between the groups meaning that the MBSR course did not affect attentional control.
 * Mindfulness influences non-directed attention and other things like emotional well-being.

Visual Attentional Control
 * Reynolds & Chelazzi (2004)
 * When directing attention to a feature like motion, neuronal activity increases in areas specific for the feature.
 * When visually searching for a non-spatial feature or a perceptual feature, selectively enhancing the sensitivity to that specific feature plays a role in directing attention.
 * Egeth & Yantis (1997)
 * The spatial separation between two objects has an effect on attention.
 * Basically, people can selectively pay attention to one of two objects in the same general location.
 * Folk, Remington, & Wright (1994) Secondary source: Pashler, Johnston, & Ruthruff (2001)
 * Showed that when people are told to look for motion, then motion will capture their attention, but attention is not captured if they are told to look for color.

Attentional Control and Unconscious Processing
 * I may move this to a different section
 * Martens, Ansorge, & Kiefer (2011)
 * Found that top down control plays a role in attentional control.
 * It constrains unconscious processing by focusing on processing pathways that are relevant to the task focused on.

Importance for Learning
 * McVay & Kane (2009) Secondary source: Cognitive Psych Book
 * Psychologists have often tried to study working memory capacity to understand how memory functions
 * The ability to predict the effectiveness of someone’s working memory capacity comes from attentional control mechanisms
 * These attentional control mechanisms help with regulation of goals, behavior, and outside distractions

Importance to Real Life Situations Algillespy (talk) 01:04, 18 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Conway, Cowan, and Bunting (2001) Secondary source: Cognitive Psych Book
 * Cocktail party phenomenon: when you hear your name even when we are not attending to the conversation
 * This is a failure of attentional control because the person did not inhibit the intake of the extraneous information
 * A screening measure for attentional control was given that tested a person’s ability to keep track of words while also doing math problems.
 * Participants were separated into low and high span attentional control
 * They then listen to two word lists read simultaneously by a male and a female voice.
 * They were told to ignore the male voice, but their name was read by the “ignored” male voice
 * Results showed that low span people were more likely to hear their name compared to high span people


 * Additions and sources all look good.
 * Organization: remember that people hop around in reading Wikipedia articles, so make each little section as independent as you can; consider moving the "mental illness" sub-section to the bottom, because most of the research isn't about that.
 * Methods: what kind of research supports these theories?  Some sections will need more method details than others, helpful to keep in mind these descriptions: 3 research methods (experiments vs correlation vs descriptive); 2 data-collection (self-report vs observation); 2 research settings (lab vs field)
 * Figures and tables: be thoughtful.  Wikicommons has lots of pictures that might be useful.  You cannot copy directly from journal articles (copyright violation), but you can recreate a figure and then donate it yourself, and some diagrams for some of these tasks will be really helpful. Greta Munger (talk) 15:13, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

Jemcdaniels editing

•	Just in general, everything looks good and some of the topics you brought up expanding your topic sound really interesting (like PTSD). Just make sure you are able to develop all of the different research and findings you have found. It’s better to go with less subtopics that are meaty and full of depth than spreading yourself really thin.

•	Is your first main section almost arguing different viewpoints, or just pointing out different ways researchers view attentional control?

•	Make sure you are not repeating yourself or the information already on the page itself (like was attentional control theory already defined? I am not sure, just wanted you to make sure)

•	Expand on the Fan et al study, wasn’t quite sure of its implications and significance

•	Was intrigued with the whole PTSD conversation!! Great connection

•	Like mentioned, pictures or something along those lines possible showing what participants had to complete in certain studies could add to your writing (not sure if that would be too hard to do or if you could explain it good enough in writing)

•	It seems like a lot of things connect back to the top down and bottom up ideas, so make sure you really focus on that

•	“Importance to real life situations” – this is a section I would make sure I read if I was interested in this topic because I like when the Wikipedia articles show the concept in a real life scenario, so hopefully you will make this a point of focus!!

Jemcdaniels (talk) 19:02, 25 April 2014 (UTC)jemcdaniels

Wikipedia Ambassador Program course assignment
This article is the subject of an educational assignment at Roosevelt University supported by the Wikipedia Ambassador Program&#32;during the 2012 Q3 term. Further details are available on the course page.

The above message was substituted from by PrimeBOT (talk) on 16:43, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Human Cognition SP23
— Assignment last updated by Faithw19 (talk) 03:58, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: PSYC 115 General Psychology
— Assignment last updated by RealSpill27 (talk) 19:11, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia Assignment Changes "Attentional Control"
ARTICLE PLAN

Elderly Section

- Add 3 secondary sources

- Add why elderly people have decreased attentional control, which occurs due to the reduced weight of the brain

- Add a secondary source to explain at what age brain weight loss occurs and why (white and gray matter) [|Colloca et al]

- Implement a secondary source that explains what white and gray matter are [|Zhao et al]

- Use a secondary source that adds one way to prevent the loss of brain volume, such as physical activity [|Erickson et al]

Relevance to Mental Illness Section

First paragraph:

- Take out the word 'also' a few times because the original article repeats it about every sentence

- The phrase 'low attentional control' is repeated numerous times, so swap it out with 'weak attentional control'

- In the middle of the first paragraph, change the neutral/encyclopedic tone and grammar in two instances:

- reword the sentence that says "developing a    psychopathology"

- reword "Researchers are also suggesting others    in the field use..."

Second paragraph:

- Add 3 secondary sources

- Add the acronym for PTSD

- Retrieve a statistic from a secondary source that points out how many people with PTSD experience reduced attentional control [|Punski‐Hoogervorst et al]

- Implement a secondary source that expands on why patients with PTSD have low attentional control and how it's triggered by emotional cues [|Block et al] [|Punski‐Hoogervorst et al]

- Report how attentional control is linked to cognitive processes

- Add a third secondary source that talks about some possible treatments used to increase attentional control (yoga and meditation) [|Cramer et al]

--Medley3636 (talk) 19:39, 20 November 2023 (UTC)