Increase of both bottom-up and top-down attentional processes in high dream recallers

Abstract

Event-related potentials (ERPs) associated with the involuntary orientation of (bottom-up) attention towards an unexpected sound are of larger amplitude in high dream recallers (HR) than in low dream recallers (LR) during passive listening, suggesting different attentional functioning. We measured bottom-up and top-down attentional performance and their cerebral correlates in 18 HR (11 women, age = 22.7 +/- 4.1 years, dream recall frequency = 5.3 +/- 1.3 days with a dream recall per week) and 19 LR (10 women, age = 22.3, DRF = 0.2 +/- 0.2) using EEG and the Competitive Attention Task. Between-group differences were found in ERPs but not in behavior. The results confirm that HR present larger ERPs to distracting sounds than LR during active listening, suggesting enhanced bottom-up processing of irrelevant sounds. HR also presented a larger contingent negative variation during target expectancy and a larger P3b response to target sounds than LR, speaking for an enhanced recruitment of top-down attention. Enhancement of both top-down and bottom-up processes in HR leads to an apparently preserved attentional balance since similar performance were observed in the two groups. Therefore, different neurophysiological profiles can result in similar cognitive performance, with some profiles possibly costlier in term of resource/energy consumption.

Auditory selective attention during a working memory task with melodies: a MEG study

“…However the results also point to differences between working memory and selective attention processes, as revealed by slightly different patterns of results in various participants groups: on the one hand, musicians exhibit greatly enhanced working memory abilities for musical sequences but only limited advantages if any for selective attention compared to non-musicians (Blain, Talamini, et al, 2022), and on the other hand, participants with high dream recall frequency are more sensitive to the presence of difficult-to-filter-out distractors than participants with a low dream recall frequency, whereas the impact of the memory task difficulty manipulation was similar is these two participant groups (Blain, de la Chapelle, et al, 2022). These between-groups differences reveal that attention and working memory are differently sensitive to expertise effects (for the effect of musical expertise on auditory working memory see for example George & Coch, 2011;Talamini et al, 2016Talamini et al, , 2017Talamini et al, , 2022 and psychophysiological traits (for the effect of such traits on auditory attention, see Ruby et al, 2013;Eichenlaub, Bertrand, et al, 2014;Eichenlaub, Nicolas, et al, 2014;Vallat et al, 2020Vallat et al, , 2022Ruby et al, 2022). Overall, behavioral results obtained so far with the MEMAT paradigm revealed both shared and separated processes subtending auditory selective attention and working memory.…”