Influence of time-of-day on joint Navon effect

Abstract

The shared attention theory suggests that people devote greater cognitive resources to those features co-attended simultaneously with others, determining better performance in several types of tasks. When co-actors performed a go/no-go Navon task attending different features of target letters, the performance was impaired, reflecting a joint Navon effect (the representation of a co-actor's attentional focus made it more difficult to select and apply one's own focus of attention), probably due to asynchronous co-attention with a decrease in cognitive resources involved. Researches in chronobiology and chronopsychology demonstrated that not only selective attention (involved in a Navon task), but also cognitive resources have a daily fluctuations, mainly paralleling the circadian rhythm of body temperature (i.e. increasing values from the morning to evening with a subsequent decline in the night). The study was conducted to assess whether the presence of joint attention, as measured by the joint Navon effect, was influenced by the time-of-day. Sixteen pairs of participants sitting next to each other were required to respond to the identity letters in a go/no-go Navon task twice: in the morning (09:00-10:00) and early afternoon (13:00-14:00). The results showed a joint Navon effect in the morning session only, suggesting that joint attention was affected by the time-of-day effect on cognitive resources.

Theory of mind and joint action in Parkinson’s disease

“…The role of the cognitive resources in modulating the joint Flanker effect is compatible with results which demonstrate that high working memory load lead to an increase in the interference produced by a distractor in the classical Flanker task (Lavie, Hirst, de Fockert, & Vidig, 2004). For instance, Fabbri and colleagues (Fabbri, Frisoni, Martoni, Tonetti, & Natale, 2017, 2018 found a modulation of joint attention according to the different availability of cognitive resources during the day, confirming the shared attention theory. According to this theory, people devote greater cognitive resources to those features of their environment that are co-attended to simultaneously with others who are sitting next to them than to resources attended to at different times with strangers or alone (Shteynberg, 2015).…”

“…Nevertheless, the different performances in the joint and individual Flanker task could also be explained according to the attentional-focus account (Dittrich et al, 2017;Doneva & Cole, 2014;Fabbri et al, 2017Fabbri et al, , 2018Porcu et al, 2016;Shteynberg, 2015). Conversely from PCC/TPJ patients, the frontal patients, who failed in the ToM task, had difficulty involving enough processing resources to code both their own action and the actions of the co-actor.…”

Gender composition of pairs influences joint action effect

“…Böckler et al (2012); see also ; Fabbri et al (2017Fabbri et al ( , 2018a required two participants, sitting next to each other, to perform a two-choice task on the identity of Navon letters (i.e., S and F for an actor and H and O for the co-actor). The letters assigned to the two participants were never intermixed and participants performed a go/no-go task.…”

“…In this case, the attending to local level processing is easier for women than for men (Müller-Oehring et al, 2007). It is worth noting that both tasks are used in the joint paradigm, suggesting that these cognitive tasks are eligible for examining joint action (Atmaca et al, 2011;Dolk et al, 2014b;Dittrich et al, 2017;Fabbri et al, 2017Fabbri et al, , 2018aPeterburs et al, 2017Peterburs et al, ). 10.3389/fpsyg.2023 The aim of the present study was to assess how gender information of co-actors influenced the joint selective attention measured in a joint flanker (Experiment 1) and joint Navon (Experiment 2) tasks.…”

Attention in naïve psychology

“…Specifically, when making identity judgments about the stimuli (a large letter composed of small letters), participants' RT-s were longer when their breadth of attention differed (being globally or locally defined) than when it was aligned. Others found indication that misaligned attentional foci have particularly devastating effect on response accuracy when the letters in the global and local foci differ, that is, not only the partner's breadth of attention but also the content of the partner's attention is in conflict with one's own (Fabbri, Frisoni, Martoni, Tonetti, & Natale, 2018).…”