Glancing and Then Looking: On the Role of Body, Affect, and Meaning in Cognitive Control

Abstract

In humans, there is a trade-off between the need to respond optimally to the salient environmental stimuli and the need to meet our long-term goals. This implies that a system of salience sensitive control exists, which trades task-directed processing off against monitoring and responding to potentially high salience stimuli that are irrelevant to the current task. Much cognitive control research has attempted to understand these mechanisms using non-affective stimuli. However, recent research has emphasized the importance of emotions, which are a major factor in the prioritization of competing stimuli and in directing attention. While relatively mature theories of cognitive control exist for non-affective settings, exactly how emotions modulate cognitive processes is less well understood. The attentional blink (AB) task is a useful experimental paradigm to reveal the dynamics of both cognitive and affective control in humans. Hence, we have developed the glance–look model, which has replicated a broad profile of data on the semantic AB task and characterized how attentional deployment is modulated by emotion. Taking inspiration from Barnard’s Interacting Cognitive Subsystems, the model relies on a distinction between two levels of meaning: implicational and propositional, which are supported by two corresponding mental subsystems: the glance and the look respectively. In our model, these two subsystems reflect the central engine of cognitive control and executive function. In particular, the interaction within the central engine dynamically establishes a task filter for salient stimuli using a neurobiologically inspired learning mechanism. In addition, the somatic contribution of emotional effects is modeled by a body-state subsystem. We argue that stimulus-driven interaction among these three subsystems governs the movement of control between them. The model also predicts attenuation effects and fringe awareness during the AB.

The experiential blink: Mapping the cost of working memory encoding onto conscious perception in the attentional blink

“…These data therefore additionally suggest that metacognitive (or introspective) capabilities monotonically increase with increases in target onset asynchrony between T1 and T2. This is in stark contrast to classic AB report accuracy, which robustly exhibits a U-shaped pattern, strictly formalised as an inverted gamma pattern across lags (Su, Bowman, & Barnard, 2011). Lau and Passingham (2006) present a related finding to ours.…”

Neural Primacy of the Salience Processing System in Schizophrenia

“…Our findings extend the neuronal network level models informing the pathophysiology of this illness. Effective cognitive control requires successful suppression of distractors (e.g., spontaneous internal thoughts) but at the same time must be responsive to unexpected stimuli, which though irrelevant to the task are salient for our homeostatic defense (Su et al., 2011). The concept of “proximal salience” refers to the switching between brain states (e.g., task-focused, resting or internally focused, and sensory-processing states) brought on by a momentary state of neural activity within the salience processing system, anchored in the rAI and the dACC (Palaniyappan and Liddle, 2012).…”

Breakthrough percepts of online identity: Detecting recognition of email addresses on the fringe of awareness

“…Additionally, due to the generation rules, several stimuli have an X in the middle, further adding to their homogeneity. When distractors are too similar to the target (e.g., same category or colour), the distractors can capture attention (Folk et al., 1992; Su et al., 2011). There needs to be heterogeneity in RSVP stimuli in order for the critical salient stimuli to stand out from the distractors.…”