Cerebral lateralization of vigilance: A function of task difficulty

Helton, William S.; Warm, Joel S.; Tripp, Lloyd D.; Matthews, Gerald; Parasuraman, Raja; Hancock, Peter A.

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2010.02.014

Cited by 111 publications

(70 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…It is possible to attribute the observed bilateral activation to task difficulty demands in the task, a similar observation made by Helton et al (2010) using fNIRS and Satterfield, Shaw and Finomore (2014) in a task measuring cerebral blood flow velocity. Subjective measures of distress appear to support this, as results indicate an increase in task distress from baseline levels, suggesting the task was stressful.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 69%

“…Although bilateral activation is a function of task difficulty (Helton et al, 2010), the laterality profiles found here cannot be solely attributed to task difficulty demands, due to these patterns of activation being found in the better performing conditions. It is also proposed that the differences in activation over time found in this experiment may explain performance differences found in previous experiments using these stimuli.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 54%

“…A consistent finding in vigilance research is that sustained attention evokes right-hemisphere lateralization in the brain in right handed individuals. Specifically, blood flow and blood oxygenation is elevated in the right hemisphere compared to the left hemisphere during vigilance, an outcome which has been found using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), positron emission tomography (PET), transcranial Doppler sonography (TCD), and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS; Berman & Weinberger, 1990;Buchsbaum et al, 1990;Cohen et al, 1988;Helton et al, 2007;Hitchcock et al, 2003;Lewin et al, 1996;Parasuraman, Warm & See, 1998;Shaw et al, 2009;Stroobant & Vingerhoets, 2000;; see Helton et al, 2010 andWarm et al, 2012 for overview). Moreover, research with commissurotomized (split-brain) patients demonstrates improved performance during vigilance tasks when signals are presented to the right hemisphere as opposed to the left hemisphere (Diamond, 1979a;1979b).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

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A functional near-infrared spectroscopy study of the effects of configural properties on sustained attention

et al. 2017

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S. (2017)A functional near-infrared spectroscopy study of the effects of configural properties on sustained attention. Neuropsychologia, 94 . pp. 106-117. ISSN 1873-3514 Access from the University of Nottingham repository: http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/47512/1/Configural%20Properties%20fNIRS.pdf Copyright and reuse:The Nottingham ePrints service makes this work by researchers of the University of Nottingham available open access under the following conditions. This article is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives licence and may be reused according to the conditions of the licence. For more details see: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ A note on versions:The version presented here may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the repository url above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription. AbstractForty-five participants performed a vigilance task during which they were required to respond to a critical signal at a local feature level, while the global display was altered between groups (either a circle, a circle broken apart and reversed, or a reconnected figure). The shape in two of the groups formed a configurative whole (the circle and reconnected conditions), while the remaining shape had no complete global element (broken circle). Performance matched the results found in the previous experiments using this stimulus set, where a configural superiority effect was found to influence accuracy over time. Physiological data, measured using functional near-infrared spectroscopy, revealed elevated activation in the right pre-frontal cortex compared to the left pre-frontal cortex during the task. Additionally, bilateral activation was found in the conditions that formed configurative wholes, while hemispheric differences over time were found in the condition that did not. These findings suggest that configural aspects of stimuli may explain why non-typical laterality effects have been found in similar research.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 69%

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 54%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

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A functional near-infrared spectroscopy study of the effects of configural properties on sustained attention

et al. 2017

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“…Task difficulty has been found to have effects on both blood flow lateralization and task performance. Higher levels of task difficulty are associated with more bilateral activation (Helton et al 2010), which in turn may have mitigating effects on vigilance decrement trends. Alternatively, the task may have been difficult enough to have essentially bottomed out in regard to performance.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The configural properties of task stimuli do influence vigilance performance

et al. 2015

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Sixty-one participants performed a sustained attention task in which they were required to respond to a critical signal requiring feature discrimination. Three separate groups performed the task with different global display configurations. The local feature elements (directional arrow shapes) were displayed on either a circle, a circle broken apart or a reconnected figure. For two of the groups, the entire display consisted of a clear global shape (circle and reconnected), and for one of the groups, the display had no discernible global element (broken circle) despite the critical signal being the same for all the groups. Analyses of hit rate and A' scores indicated that the broken circle group had impaired performance compared to the global figure groups. A configural superiority effect was found in which performance was improved by having a global shape property to the entire display. These results provide a behavioural base for further research utilizing measures of cerebral activation, as cerebral activity during vigilance tasks may be dependent on both task difficulty and hierarchical aspects of the display. The configurable or hierarchical aspects of vigilance displays may be critical in understanding sustained attention performance and its hemispheric lateralization.

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“…One difference may be the increased task difficulty of phasic-alertness tasks, leading to the recruitment of additional (left-hemisphere) resources [for related discussions, see Helton et al, 2010;Nebel et al, 2005]: Phasic alerting requires participants to distinguish warning stimuli from imperative ones [Sturm and Willmes, 2001], which may be especially demanding when cued and uncued trials are presented in a randomly mixed fashion [see, e.g., Fan et al, 2005;Thiel and Fink, 2007; but see Sturm and Willmes, 2001, for a non-mixed approach]. In fact, Jaffard and coworkers [Jaffard et al, 2007[Jaffard et al, , 2008 showed that this mixing leads to sustained proactive inhibition to prevent erroneous responding to cues.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Staying responsive to the world: Modality‐specific and ‐nonspecific contributions to speeded auditory, tactile, and visual stimulus detection

Langner

Kellermann

Eickhoff

et al. 2011

Human Brain Mapping

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Sustained responsiveness to external stimulation is fundamental to many time-critical interactions with the outside world. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging during speeded stimulus detection to identify convergent and divergent neural correlates of maintaining the readiness to respond to auditory, tactile, and visual stimuli. In addition, using a multimodal condition, we investigated the effect of making stimulus modality unpredictable. Relative to sensorimotor control tasks, all three unimodal detection tasks elicited stronger activity in the right temporo-parietal junction, inferior frontal cortex, anterior insula, dorsal premotor cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex as well as bilateral mid-cingulum, midbrain, brainstem, and medial cerebellum. The multimodal detection condition additionally activated left dorsal premotor cortex and bilateral precuneus. Modality-specific modulations were confined to respective sensory areas: we found activity increases in relevant, and decreases in irrelevant sensory cortices. Our findings corroborate the modality independence of a predominantly right-lateralized core network for maintaining an alert (i.e., highly responsive) state and extend previous results to the somatosensory modality. Monitoring multiple sensory channels appears to induce additional processing, possibly related to stimulus-driven shifts of intermodal attention. The results further suggest that directing attention to a given sensory modality selectively enhances and suppresses sensory processing-even in simple detection tasks, which do not require inter- or intra-modal selection.

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Cerebral lateralization of vigilance: A function of task difficulty

Cited by 111 publications

References 45 publications

A functional near-infrared spectroscopy study of the effects of configural properties on sustained attention

A functional near-infrared spectroscopy study of the effects of configural properties on sustained attention

The configural properties of task stimuli do influence vigilance performance

Staying responsive to the world: Modality‐specific and ‐nonspecific contributions to speeded auditory, tactile, and visual stimulus detection

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