Research has demonstrated that the human cognitive system allocates attention most efficiently to a stimulus that occurs in synchrony with an established rhythmic background. However, our environment is dynamic and constantly changing. What happens when rhythms to which our cognitive system adapted disappear? We addressed this question using a visual categorization task comprising emotional and neutral faces. The task was split into three blocks of which the first and the last were completed in silence. The second block was accompanied by an acoustic background rhythm that, for one group of participants, was synchronous with face presentations, and for another group was asynchronous. Irrespective of group, performance improved with background stimulation. Importantly, improved performance extended into the third silent block for the synchronous, but not for the asynchronous group. These data suggest that attentional entrainment resulting from rhythmic environmental regularities disintegrates only gradually after the regularities disappear.

Background: Schizophrenia is often characterized by a general disruption of self-processing and self-demarcation. Previous studies have shown that self-monitoring and sense of agency (SoA, i.e., the ability to recognize one's own actions correctly) are altered in schizophrenia patients. However, research findings are inconclusive in regards to how SoA alterations are linked to clinical symptoms and their severity, or cognitive factors.Methods: In a longitudinal study, we examined 161 first-episode schizophrenia patients and 154 controls with a continuous-report SoA task and a control task testing general cognitive/sensorimotor processes. Clinical symptoms were assessed with the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS).Results: In comparison to controls, patients performed worse in terms of recognition of self-produced movements even when controlling for confounding factors. Patients' SoA score correlated with the severity of PANSS-derived “Disorganized” symptoms and with a priori defined symptoms related to self-disturbances. In the follow-up, the changes in the two subscales were significantly associated with the change in SoA performance.Conclusion: We corroborated previous findings of altered SoA already in the early stage of schizophrenia. Decreased ability to recognize self-produced actions was associated with the severity of symptoms in two complementary domains: self-disturbances and disorganization. While the involvement of the former might indicate impairment in self-monitoring, the latter suggests the role of higher cognitive processes such as information updating or cognitive flexibility. The SoA alterations in schizophrenia are associated, at least partially, with the intensity of respective symptoms in a state-dependent manner.

Distracting sensory events can capture attention, interfering with the performance of the task at hand. We asked: is our attention captured by such events if we cause them ourselves? To examine this, we employed a visual search task with an additional salient singleton distractor, where the distractor was predictable either by the participant’s own (motor) action or by an endogenous cue; accordingly, the task was designed to isolate the influence of motor and non-motor predictive processes. We found both types of prediction, cue- and action-based, to attenuate the interference of the distractor—which is at odds with the “attentional white bear” hypothesis, which states that prediction of distracting stimuli mandatorily directs attention towards them. Further, there was no difference between the two types of prediction. We suggest this pattern of results may be better explained by theories postulating general predictive mechanisms, such as the framework of predictive processing, as compared to accounts proposing a special role of action–effect prediction, such as theories based on optimal motor control. However, rather than permitting a definitive decision between competing theories, our study highlights a number of open questions, to be answered by these theories, with regard to how exogenous attention is influenced by predictions deriving from the environment versus our own actions.

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