Project on mindfulness and distraction receives funding from the Bial Foundation

Fabrice Parmentier (Main Applicant and Fellow of the Bial Foundation) together with Pilar Andrés, Mauro García-Toro, Javier García-Campayo and Margalida Gili-Planas have been awarded 47500 Euros of research funding from the Bial Foundation to investigate the relationship between dispositional mindfulness and distraction. The 3-year project entitled "A study of the relationship between mindfulness, distraction and brain stimulation" is scheduled to start on June 1st, 2015.

The project will explore the links between mindfulness, psychological processes such as emotional regulation, attentional control and ruminations, as well as performance in a series of laboratory-based tasks measuring attentional functions. The project will also involve an experiment using brain stimulation with the aim to investigate the potential link between mindfulness and the activity of frontal cortical regions. 

What is mindfulness?

Mindfulness can be described as a specific way to pay attention: on purpose, in the present moment and in a nonjudgmental way (Kabat-Zinn, 1994). Originating from Buddhist meditation (Braer, 2003), the concept of mindfulness forms part of a rapidly increasing number of psychological treatments. More generally, mindfulness is thought to help develop core processes such as cognitive flexibility and attention and the better regulation of emotions (Malinowski, 2013). 

References

Baer, R. A. (2003). Mindfulness training as a clinical intervention: A conceptual and empirical review. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 10, 125-142.

Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever you go, there you are: Mindfulness meditation in everyday life. New York, NY: Hyperion.

Malinowski, P. (2013). Neural mechanisms of attentional control in mindfulness meditation. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 7, doi: 10.3389/fnins.2013.00008.

Our website is one year old

A year has gone by since March 31st 2014, and it's been a busy first year for our website. Over the last 12 months the size has received around 2000 visits from over 750 unique visitors from around the world. Countries generating most visits are Spain (38.2%), the USA (16.3%), Russia (5.8%), the UK (4.5%), Brazil (2.8%) and Germany (2.38%).

Traffic on our site over the last 12 months

Most visitors use a desktop computer (89%) but visits from mobile devices is slowly inceasing and represents so far 11% of all page views.  The largest part of our audience (76.5%) is aged between 18 and 44.

Do unexpected sounds suspend cognition in patients with anxiety disorders?

In our latest study, we compared 16 patients with anxiety disorders and 16 matched control participants in a cross-modal oddball task in which they were asked to categorize the parity of visual digits while ignoring task-irrelevant sounds preceding each digit. Rare and unexpected changes in the stream of sounds delayed responses equally in both groups but patients showed a selective increase in the number of response omissions. Our results suggest that faced with a deviant sound, patients with anxiety disorders have a greater tendency to see their cognitive activity temporarily suspended. Interestingly, however, when patients’ behaviour did not “freeze”, their performance (in terms of response accuracy and response times) was as accurate as that of control participants. We suggest that this may reflect a deficient calibration of a circuit-breaker system thought to “freeze” all actions in the face of unexpected events.

"We conclude that pathological anxiety might lower the threshold of activation of a circuit breaker interrupting ongoing cognitive processes and resulting, with a greater probability than in controls, in the temporary suspension of responses"

Mean proportion of correct responses (Panel A), mean proportion of omissions (Panel B), and mean response times for correct responses (Panel C), for the standard and deviant conditions in patients with anxiety and control participants. Error bars represent one standard error of the mean.

Reference: Pacheco-Unguetti, A. P., Gelabert, J. M., & Parmentier, F. B. R. (2015). Can auditory deviant stimuli temporarily suspend cognitive processing? Evidence from patients with anxiety. Manuscript in press in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Inspiring talk by Prof. Fernando Maestú about the use of MEG to study cognition and neurological conditions

Yesterday we had the privilege to attend a talk by Prof. Fernando Maestú, Director of the Laboratory of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience of the Center for Biomedical Technology of Madrid, who was invited by the EvoCog Group within the program of the PhD in Evolution and Cognition.

Prof. Fernando Maestú, Director of the Laboratory of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience, Madrid.

Prof. Maestú gave an outstanding and very stimulating overview of the principles and usefulness of magnetoencephalography (MEG) to study cognitive functions, from language to executive functions, and neurological diseases (e.g., Alzheimer's disease). The talk covered several lines of investigation showing how brain and mental function intertwine, how neuropsychological rehabilitation modifies the connectivity of the brain, how culture influences the organization of its functional areas, how cognition and its behavioral manifestations are best understood when taking into account the functional dynamics of brain activity. While a lot of effort has typically been spent on identifying brain areas active in certain tasks, the work presented yesterday by Prof. Maestú shows how the connectivity measured at rest provides crucial keys to understand cognition or to predict cognitive decline in old age. An outstanding talk making state-of-the-art science accessible and very stimulating, spanning from the fundamental principles of MEG to important theoretical and practical (e.g., health) implications.

Distraction and predictability: A new paper in press in Brain Research

New research based on data collected by Miriam Kefauver as part of her undergraduate dissertation has been accepted for publication in the journal Brain Research. The paper will form part of a special issue on Prediction and Attention.

The study demonstrates that the semantic distraction yielded by the involuntary processing of task-irrelevant sounds is mediated by its predictive value of the congruency of an upcoming target stimulus.

Reference: Parmentier, F. B. R., & Kefauver, M. (in press). The semantic aftermath of distraction by deviant sounds: Crosstalk interference is mediated by the predictability of semantic congruency. Brain Research.

Abstract: Rare changes in a stream of otherwise repeated task-irrelevant sounds break through selective attention and disrupt performance in an unrelated visual task. This deviance distraction effect emerges because deviant sounds violate the cognitive system’s predictions. In this study we sought to examine whether predictability also mediate the so-called semantic effect whereby behavioral performance suffers from the clash between the involuntary semantic evaluation of irrelevant sounds and the voluntary processing of visual targets (e.g., when participants must categorize a right visual arrow following the presentation of the deviant sound “left”). By manipulating the conditional probabilities of the congruent and incongruent deviant sounds in a left/right arrow categorization task, we elicited implicit predictions about the upcoming target and related response. We observed a linear increase of the semantic effect with the proportion of congruent deviant trials (i.e., as deviant sounds increasingly predicted congruent targets). We conclude that deviant sounds affect response times based on a combination of crosstalk interference and two types of prediction violations: stimulus violations (violations of predictions regarding the identity of upcoming irrelevant sounds) and semantic violations (violations of predictions regarding the target afforded by deviant sounds). We report a three-parameter model that captures all key features of the observed RTs. Overall, our results fit with the view that the brain builds forward models of the environment in order to optimize cognitive processing and that control of one’s attention and actions is called upon when predictions are violated.