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"Attention Processes"
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New Perspectives on Music in Rehabilitation of Executive and Attention Functions
Modern music therapy, starting around the middle of the twentieth century was primarily conceived to promote emotional well-being and to facilitate social group association and integration. Therefore, it was rooted mostly in social science concepts. More recently, music as therapy began to move decidedly toward perspectives of neuroscience. This has been facilitated by the advent of neuroimaging techniques that help uncover the therapeutic mechanisms for non-musical goals in the brain processes underlying music perception, cognition, and production. In this paper, we focus on executive function (EF) and attentional processes (AP) that are central for cognitive rehabilitation efforts. To this end, we summarize existing behavioral as well as neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies in musicians, non-musicians, and clinical populations. Musical improvisation and instrumental playing may have some potential for EF/AP stimulation and neurorehabilitation. However, more neuroimaging studies are needed to investigate the neural mechanisms for the active musical performance. Furthermore, more randomized clinical trials combined with neuroimaging techniques are warranted to demonstrate the specific efficacy and neuroplasticity induced by music-based interventions.
Journal Article
Targeting Cognition and Behavior Post-Stroke: Combined Emotional Music Stimulation and Virtual Attention Training in a Quasi-Randomized Study
Background: Emotionally salient music may enhance attention-focused rehabilitation, yet concurrent music plus virtual-reality programs in chronic stroke are largely untested. We assessed whether personalized emotional music stimulation (EMS) layered onto a standardized virtual reality rehabilitation system (VRRS) augments cognitive, affective, physiological, and functional outcomes. Methods: In a quasi-randomized outpatient trial, 20 adults ≥ 6 months post-ischemic stroke were allocated by order of recruitment to VRRS alone (control, n = 10) or VRRS+EMS (experimental, n = 10). Both groups performed 45 min of active VRRS cognitive training (3×/week, 8 weeks), while the EMS group received approximately 60 min sessions including setup and feedback phases. Primary outcomes were cognition and global function; secondary outcomes were intrinsic motivation, depression, anxiety, and heart rate. Non-parametric tests with effect sizes and Δ-scores were used. Results: The experimental group improved across all domains: cognition (median +4.5 points), motivation (median +54 points), depression (median −3.5 points), anxiety (median −4.0 points), heart rate (median −6.35 beats per minute), and disability (median one-grade improvement), each with large effects. The control group showed smaller gains in cognition and motivation and a modest heart-rate reduction, without significant changes in mood or disability. At post-treatment, the music group outperformed controls on cognition, motivation, and disability. Change-score analyses favored the music group for every endpoint. Larger heart-rate reductions correlated with greater improvements in depression (ρ = 0.73, p < 0.001) and anxiety (ρ = 0.58, p = 0.007). Conclusions: Adding personalized emotional music to virtual-reality attention training produced coherent, clinically relevant gains in cognition, mood, motivation, autonomic regulation, and independence compared with virtual reality alone.
Journal Article
The effects of aerobic exercise on goal-directed attention and inhibitory control in individuals with high trait anxiety: an EEG study
Anxiety is known to significantly impair cognitive function, particularly attentional control. While exercise has been demonstrated to alleviate these cognitive deficits, the precise neural mechanisms underlying these effects remain poorly understood. This study examines the effects of exercise on attentional control in individuals with high trait anxiety, based on attentional control theory, which suggests that such individuals have reduced top-down attention. Thirty-eight participants were randomly assigned to either an exercise group or a reading group. The exercise group engaged in 30 min of moderate-intensity cycling, while the reading group spent 30 min reading quietly. In Experiment 1, goal-directed attention was assessed using a cue-object paradigm, and in Experiment 2, inhibitory control was evaluated through a visual search task. EEG data indicated that the exercise group exhibited significantly larger Pd components in both experiments, suggesting enhanced attentional focus and improved inhibition of distractors. These findings suggest that aerobic exercise enhances top-down attentional processes, particularly goal-directed attention and distractor inhibition, offering potential as an intervention for individuals with high trait anxiety.
Journal Article
Effectiveness of Virtual Reality on Attention Training for Elementary School Students
This study is aimed at investigating the effectiveness of virtual reality (VR) on attention training for elementary school students. A pre-test and post-test design of the quasi-experimental method was adopted and 66 third and fourth graders from an elementary school in Hsinchu, Taiwan were used as experimental subjects, divided into a control group and experimental group. The former used the computerized Attention Process Training (APT) system and the latter used the proposed VR system for attention training, both for two weeks. The attention scale for elementary school children was used to evaluate the participant’s attention before and after training, including the dimensions of focused attention, sustained attention, selective attention, alternating attention, and divided attention. A questionnaire survey was conducted to measure the learning anxiety and cognitive load during the training process. The experimental results indicated: (1) The overall attention was significantly improved after the training process for both groups, and the VR system was more effective than the computerized APT in improving children’s attention. (2) The questionnaire results showed that the experimental group had lower learning anxiety and cognitive load than the control group. According to the experimental results, VR training is more effective in improving the attention of participants while reducing their learning anxiety and cognitive load. Therefore, it is a useful tool for attention training in elementary schools.
Journal Article
Does Non-Immersive Virtual Reality Improve Attention Processes in Severe Traumatic Brain Injury? Encouraging Data from a Pilot Study
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a sudden injury that causes damage to the brain. Rehabilitation therapies include specific training, such as attention process training (APT) programs using either standard or innovative approaches. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effects of a non-immersive virtual reality-based attention training to stimulate attention processes and mood in TBI patients. Thirty subjects with TBI were enrolled at the Neurorehabilitation Unit of the IRCCS Neurolesi Center and divided into either the Conventional Attention Process Training Group (C_APT: n = 15) or the Virtual-Based Attention Processes Training Group (VB_APT: n = 15), treated with the Virtual Reality Rehabilitation System (VRRS-Evo). All of the patients were evaluated with a specific psychometric battery before (T0) and after the end (T1) of each program. We found statistically significant differences between the two groups, in particular concerning global cognitive status (p < 0.02), attention processes (p < 0.03), depression symptoms (p < 0.04) and visual attention (p < 0.01). Experimental intragroup analysis showed great statistical significances in all psychometric tests, i.e., the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (p < 0.0006), Attention Matrices (p < 0.0007), the Hamilton Rating Scale-Depression (p < 0.004), the Trail Making Test-A (p < 0.0007), the Trail Making Test-B (p < 0.0007), and the Trail Making test-BA (p < 0.007). Our results suggest that non-immersive virtual reality may be a useful and effective approach for the attention processes recovery and mood of TBI patients, leading to better cognitive and behavioral outcomes.
Journal Article
Towards Efficient Recurrent Architectures: A Deep LSTM Neural Network Applied to Speech Enhancement and Recognition
Long short-term memory (LSTM) has proven effective in modeling sequential data. However, it may encounter challenges in accurately capturing long-term temporal dependencies. LSTM plays a central role in speech enhancement by effectively modeling and capturing temporal dependencies in speech signals. This paper introduces a variable-neurons-based LSTM designed for capturing long-term temporal dependencies by reducing neuron representation in layers with no loss of data. A skip connection between nonadjacent layers is added to prevent gradient vanishing. An attention mechanism in these connections highlights important features and spectral components. Our LSTM is inherently causal, making it well-suited for real-time processing without relying on future information. Training involves utilizing combined acoustic feature sets for improved performance, and the models estimate two time–frequency masks—the ideal ratio mask (IRM) and the ideal binary mask (IBM). Comprehensive evaluation using perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) and short-time objective intelligibility (STOI) showed that the proposed LSTM architecture demonstrates enhanced speech intelligibility and perceptual quality. Composite measures further substantiated performance, considering residual noise distortion (Cbak) and speech distortion (Csig). The proposed model showed a 16.21% improvement in STOI and a 0.69 improvement in PESQ on the TIMIT database. Similarly, with the LibriSpeech database, the STOI and PESQ showed improvements of 16.41% and 0.71 over noisy mixtures. The proposed LSTM architecture outperforms deep neural networks (DNNs) in different stationary and nonstationary background noisy conditions. To train an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system on enhanced speech, the Kaldi toolkit is used for evaluating word error rate (WER). The proposed LSTM at the front-end notably reduced WERs, achieving a notable 15.13% WER across different noisy backgrounds.
Journal Article
Attention : theory and practice
Attention: Theory and Practice provides a balance between a readable overview of attention and an emphasis on how theories and paradigms for the study of attention have developed. The book highlights the important issues and major findings while giving sufficient details of experimental studies, models, and theories so that results and conclusions are easy to follow and evaluate. Rather than brushing over tricky technical details, the authors explain them clearly, giving readers the benefit of understanding the motivation for and techniques of the experiments in order to allow readers to think through results, models, and theories for themselves. Attention is an accessible text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in psychology, as well as an important resource for researchers and practitioners interested in gaining an overview of the field of attention.
eBook
Design Element Preferences in Public Facilities: An Eye Tracking Study
As a highly used form of architecture, public facilities are closely related to people’s daily lives. The aesthetic level of their design greatly affects the quality of people’s lives and interactions, as well as the appearance of the whole area. However, research on their design elements has not received enough attention, and few quantitative studies on the design of public facilities simultaneously focus on multiple influencing factors such as color and material. Therefore, this study uses eye-tracking technology and audience aesthetic preference evaluation to explore the appropriate combination of color and materials in sign design. This study found that, in the design of public facilities and in terms of aesthetic preference, firstly, color has more influence on subjective preference and objective gaze behavior than material. Secondly, men prefer technological and changeable colors and materials, and women prefer soft and uniform materials. Finally, visitors spend more time gazing at their preferred signs, which means that visitors’ top-down gaze behavior and bottom-up psychological perception are highly unified. Regarding material perception, visitors’ subjective preferences are influenced by the physical or cultural properties of the material itself. This study’s results will provide suggestions for future urban and landscape architecture design in terms of color and material aesthetics, and the research methodology can be applied to more scenarios in environmental spaces.
Journal Article