Summary: With the explosion of digital media and technologies, commentators have become increasingly vocal about the role that an ‘attention economy’ plays in our lives. 1 The rise of today’s digital culture coincides with longstanding scientific questions about why humans sometimes remember and sometimes forget, and why some individuals remember better than others. 2 – 6 We examined whether spontaneous attention lapses –– in the moment 7 – 12 , across individuals 13 – 15 , and as a function of everyday media multitasking 16 – 19 –– negatively relate to remembering. EEG+pupillometry measures of attention 20 – 21 were recorded as 80 young adults performed a goal-directed episodic encoding and retrieval task 22 . Trait-level sustained attention was further quantified via task-based 23 and questionnaire measures 24 – 25 . Leveraging trial-to-trial retrieval data, we show that tonic lapses of attention in the moment prior to remembering, assayed by posterior alpha power and pupil diameter, related to reductions in neural signals of goal coding and memory, along with behavioral forgetting. Independent measures of trait-level attention lapsing mediated the relationship between neural assays of lapsing and memory performance, and between media multitasking and memory. Attention lapses partially account for why we remember or forget in the moment, and why some individuals remember better than others. Heavier media multitasking is associated with a propensity to suffer attention lapses and forgetting.

Background and Purpose Children born preterm are at risk for adverse outcome, including visual impairment. We examined the relationship between neonatal DTI and sVEP in children born preterm to determine whether visual outcomes are related to early measurements of brain microstructure. Materials and Methods Subjects were born <34 weeks gestation and imaged prior to term equivalent age. DTI fiber tracking was used to delineate the optic radiations and measure tract-specific average FA, mean apparent diffusion coefficient (Dav), parallel, and transverse diffusivity. Visual evoked response amplitudes were measured as a function of spatial frequency, contrast, and vernier offset size with sVEP at 6–20 months after birth. The association between DTI and sVEP was assessed using the Spearman correlation coefficient, and linear regression for repeated measures. Results Nine children with 15 scans were included. The peak response amplitudes for spatial frequency sweeps were associated with increasing FA, and decreasing Dav and transverse diffusivity (P≤0.006), but not the parallel diffusivity (P=1). There was only modest association with the swept contrast condition, and no detectable association with the vernier offset sweeps. Conclusion Microstructure of the optic radiations measured shortly after birth is associated with quantitatively measured responses elicited by moderate to high contrast spatio-temporal gratings in infancy. These findings are in keeping with studies showing a relationship between brain microstructure and function. While the clinical impact is not known, quantitative neuroimaging of white matter may ultimately be important for predicting outcome in preterm newborns.

Motion sensitivity increases during childhood, but little is known about the underlying neural correlates. Most studies investigating children’s evoked responses have not dissociated direction-specific and non-direction-specific responses. To isolate direction-specific responses, we presented coherently moving dot stimuli preceded by a period of incoherent motion, to 6- to 7-year-olds (n = 34), 8- to 10-year-olds (n = 34), 10- to 12-year-olds (n = 34) and adults (n = 20). Participants reported the direction of coherent motion while high-density EEG was recorded. Using a data-driven approach, we identified two stimulus-locked EEG components with distinct topographies: an early component with an occipital topography and a later, sustained positive component over centro-parietal electrodes. The component waveforms showed clear age-related differences, and scaled with motion coherence. In the early, occipital component, all groups showed a negativity peaking at ~300ms, like the previously reported coherent-motion N2. However, the children, unlike adults, showed an additional positive peak at ~200ms. The later positive response in the centro-parietal component rose more steeply for adults than for the youngest children, likely reflecting age-related changes in decision-making. These results suggest that children’s protracted development of coherent motion sensitivity is associated with gradual maturation of both early sensory and later decision-related processes.

Musical engagement can be conceptualized through various activities, modes of listening, and listener states - among these a state of focused engagement. Recent research has reported that this state can be indexed by the inter-subject correlation (ISC) of EEG responses to a shared naturalistic stimulus. While statistically significant ISC has been reported during music listening, these reports have considered only correlations computed across entire excerpts and do not provide insights into time-varying engagement. Here we present the first EEG-ISC investigation of time-varying engagement within a musical work. From a sample of 23 adult musicians who listened to a cello concerto movement, we find varying levels of ISC throughout the excerpt. In particular, significant ISC is observed during periods of musical tension that build to climactic highpoints, but not at the highpoints themselves. In addition, we find that a control stimulus retaining low-frequency envelope characteristics of the intact music, but little other temporal structure, also elicits significant neural correlation, though to a lesser extent than the original. In all, our findings shed light on temporal dynamics of listener engagement during music listening, establish connections between salient musical events and EEG-ISC, and clarify specific listener states that are indexed by this measure.