Alicia Leiva is awarded a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral grant!

Alicia testing a participant in the Cognitive Psychology Laboratory

Congratulations to Alicia who has just been awarded a 2 years post-doctoral position by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry, and Competitiveness to go work with Prof. Juan Lupiañez at the University of Granada. Alicia was ranked 3rd nation-wide and is one of only 7 recipients of this highly competitive scheme in the psychology category.

The Juan de la Cierva scheme is one of two national schemes aimed at promoting the post-doctoral fundamental research training of young scientists in Spanish researcher centers. A total of 225 grants have been awarded as part of the 2017 call, 7 of them in psychology.

Keynote address at the 13th Annual Meeting of the Portuguese Society for Experimental Psychology

Prof. Fabrice Parmentier delivering the keynote address at the 13th Annual Meeting of the APPE (April 13th, 2018)

On April 13th-14th, the University of Minho hosted the 13th Annual Meeting of the Portuguese Society for Experimental Psychology (APPE), an exciting and stimulating event gathering researchers in all fields of experimental psychology from all around Portugal and, as this year's Keynote Speaker, Prof. Fabrice Parmentier.

Keynote conference by Fabrice Parmentier: Why do unexpected sounds distract us?

Abstract: 
Unexpected auditory stimuli presented in the context of an otherwise repetitive or structured acoustic background ineluctably break through selective attention filters and capture our attention. Past research abundantly described the electrophysiological markers of such phenomenon. Unexpected sounds also affect behavioral performance in an ongoing, unrelated, task, resulting in distraction. Such distraction typically translates in slower response to target stimuli. While this effect was initially regarded as a simple byproduct of an involuntary orienting response towards novelty, recent studies have shed light on the cognitive mechanisms underpinning this effect and unearthed a number of factors mediating it. In this talk, I will review experimental results aiming to identify the cognitive determinants of this type of distraction, its mediation by some stimulus- and participant-based characteristics, and present some recent evidence suggesting that unexpected sounds might disrupt motor actions.

¡Reciba dinero participando en nuestos experimentos!

Electroencephalographic and skin temperature indices of vigilance and inhibitory control

Fluctuations of attention can be monitored using EEG and skin temperature. Congratulations to Enrique Molina for his latest publication!

Reference
Lara, T., Molina, E., Madrid, J. A., & Correa, A. (2018). Electroencephalographic and skin temperature indices of vigilance and inhibitory control, Manuscript in press in Psicologica.

Abstract
Neurophysiological markers of the ability to sustain attention and exert inhibitory control of inappropriate responses have usually relied on neuroimaging methods, which are not easily applicable to real-world settings. The current research tested the ability of electroencephalographic and skin temperature markers to predict performance during the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART), which demands vigilance and inhibitory control. In Experiment 1, we recorded the electroencephalogram (EEG) during the performance of SART and found that eventrelated potentials underlying inhibitory control (N1 and N2/P3) were influenced by a time on task effect, suggesting a decrement in attentional resources necessary for optimal inhibitory control. In Experiments 2 and 3, we recorded skin temperatures (distal, proximal and the distal-proximal temperature gradient –DPG) and found that 2 they were sensitive to differential demands of mental workload, and that they were related to behavioural performance in the SART. This study suggests that the recording of EEG and skin temperature may be used to monitor fluctuations of attention in natural settings, although further research should clarify the exact psychological interpretation of these physiological indices.

Download the paper here

More distracted by food irrelevant words when you're hungry

Food distract us more when we're hungry

In their recently published study, Fabrice Parmentier, Toñi Pacheco and Sara Valero explored whether the distraction by task-irrelevant deviant words is mediated by the extent to which these words relate to our biological needs. in this study, participants were asked to categorize visual digits while ignoring task-irrelevant sounds. On rare occasions these sounds were food-related words or control words (as opposed to a tone). Participants who came to the laboratory in a state of hunger exhibited greater distraction by the irrelevant words than satiated participants. In contrast, satiated participants showed facilitation in ignoring the deviant food-related words. These effects were observed  in the first block of trials only, suggesting rapid semantic saturation thereafter. These results follow up on the work by Parmentier (2008) and demonstrate that irrelevant deviant words undergo semantic processing even when they share no feature with the primary task.

Reference: Parmentier, F. B. R., Pacheco-Unguetti, A. P., & Valero, S. (2018). Food words distract the hungry: Evidence of involuntary semantic processing of task-irrelevant but biologically-relevant unexpected auditory words. PLoSONE 13(1): e0190644.
[Download here]

Abstract: Rare changes in a stream of otherwise repeated task-irrelevant sounds break through selective attention and disrupt performance in an unrelated visual task by triggering shifts of attention to and from the deviant sound (deviance distraction). Evidence indicates that the involuntary orientation of attention to unexpected sounds is followed by their semantic processing. However, past demonstrations relied on tasks in which the meaning of the deviant sounds overlapped with features of the primary task. Here we examine whether such processing is observed when no such overlap is present but sounds carry some relevance to the participants’ biological need to eat when hungry. We report the results of an experiment in which hungry and satiated participants partook in a cross-modal oddball task in which they categorized visual digits (odd/even) while ignoring task-irrelevant sounds. On most trials the irrelevant sound was a sinewave tone (standard sound). On the remaining trials, deviant sounds consisted of spoken words related to food (food deviants) or control words (control deviants). Questionnaire data confirmed state (but not trait) differences between the two groups with respect to food craving, as well as a greater desire to eat the food corresponding to the food-related words in the hungry relative to the satiated participants. The results of the oddball task revealed that food deviants produced greater distraction (longer response times) than control deviants in hungry participants while the reverse effect was observed in satiated participants. This effect was observed in the first block of trials but disappeared thereafter, reflecting semantic saturation. Our results suggest that (1) the semantic content of deviant sounds is involuntarily processed even when sharing no feature with the primary task; and that (2) distraction by deviant sounds can be modulated by the participants’ biological needs.