Impact of Chronic Stress on Attention Control:Evidence from Behavioral and Event-Related Potential Analyses

Chronic stress affects brain function,so assessing its hazards is important for mental health.To overcome the limitations of behavioral data,we combined behavioral and event-related potentials(ERPs)in an attention network task.This task allowed us to differentiate between three specific aspects of attention:alerting,orienting,and execution.Forty-one participants under chronic stress and 31 non-stressed participants were enrolled.On the performance level,the chronically stressed group showed a significantly slower task response and lower accuracy.Concerning ERP measures,smaller cue-N1,cueN2,and larger cue-P3 amplitudes were found in the stressed group,indicating that this group was less able to assign attention to effective information,i.e.,they made inefficient use of cues and had difficulty in maintaining alerting.In addition,the stressed group showed larger target-N2 amplitudes,indicating that this group needed to allocate more cognitive resources to deal with the conflict targets task.Subgroup analysis revealed lower target-P3 amplitudes in the stressed than in the non-stressed group.Group differences associated with the attention networks were found at the ERP level.In the stressed group,excessive depletion of resources led to changes in attention control.In this study,we examined the effects of chronic stress on individual executive function from a neurological perspective.The results may benefit the development of interventions to improve executive function in chronically stressed individuals.

Sensory Modality Matters in Attentional Control

Imagine how many times your attention is distracted by the surrounding sounds or sights irrelevant to your work or study.To maintain concentrated,you have to control yourself intentionally,which is called"attentional control"or"cognitive control"in psychology.An interesting question arises:when we successfully direct our attention away from one visual distractor,can we be immune to another

A selective attention-based contextual perception approach for a humanoid robot

A humanoid robot is always flooded by sensed information when sensing the environment, and it usually needs significant time to compute and process the sensed information. In this paper, a selective attention-based contextual perception approach was proposed for humanoid robots to sense the environment with high efficiency. First, the connotation of attention window （AW） is extended to make a more general and abstract definition of AW, and its four kinds of operations and state transformations are also discussed. Second, the attention control policies are described, which integrate intensionguided perceptual objects selection and distractor inhibition, and can deal with emergent issues. Distractor inhibition is used to filter unrelated information. Last, attention policies are viewed as the robot＇s perceptual modes, which can control and adjust the perception efficiency. The experimental results show that the presented approach can promote the perceptual efficiency significantly, and the perceptual cost can be effectively controlled through adopting different attention policies.

Hope and Academic Procrastination in Adolescents: A Moderated Mediation Model

Academic procrastination among adolescents is an increasingly prominent problem. It is important to look forinfluences behind academic procrastination in the adolescent population. The present study aimed to revealthe explanatory mechanisms underlying the association between hope and academic procrastination behaviorsamong Chinese adolescents by testing the mediating role of attentional control and the moderating role of traitmindfulness. Participants in the current study were 1156 Chinese adolescents who completed self-report questionnaireson hope, attentional control, academic procrastination, and trait mindfulness. The results indicatedthat adolescent hope was negatively related to academic procrastination and that attentional control partiallymediated this association. In addition, trait mindfulness moderated the direct association between hope and academicprocrastination in the mediated model. In conclusion, identifying the mechanisms by which hope is associatedwith academic procrastination in adolescent populations is of potential value for the prevention of andintervention in this undesirable study habit.