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Research studies have focused on stimulus features as well as internal or contextual factors to understand aesthetic experience. An important question is the nature of processes that are involved in all aesthetic experiences. One possible process is "disinterested attention" that may be necessary for one to have an aesthetic experience. This can be contrasted with a perceiver who attends to an object or event only in a goal-directed or instrumental or practical manner. It has been claimed that "disinterested attention" involves attention being focused on the aesthetic object or event while being distributed across its features or components. Other ideas have focused on better reallocation of attention over time. The potential nature of attention could be linked to aspects of mindfulness. Studies looking at the effects of mindfulness on aesthetic experience have shown it increases the frequency of having aesthetic experience. The nature of attention needed for an aesthetic experience can be thought of as a form of generosity that could be linked to the notions of a gift. Mindful attention to objects or life as a gift, perhaps enables us to see objects and perhaps life itself in non-instrumental terms resulting in an aesthetic experience.

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Category learning is a crucial aspect of cognition that involves organizing entities into equivalence classes. Whereas adults tend to focus on category-relevant features, young children often distribute attention between relevant and irrelevant ones. The reasons for children's distributed attention are not fully understood. In two category-learning experiments with adults and with children aged 4, 5, and 6 (N = 201), we examined potential drivers of distributed attention, including (a) immature filtering of distractors and (b) the general tendency for exploration or broad information sampling. By eliminating distractor competition, we reduced filtering demands. Despite identifying the features critical for accurate categorization, children, regardless of their categorization performance, continued sampling more information than was necessary. These results indicate that the tendency to sample information extensively contributes to distributed attention in young children. We identify candidate drivers of this tendency that need to be examined in future research.

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INTRODUCTION: In the 1950s and 1960s, John Senders carried out a number of influential experiments on the monitoring of multidegree-of-freedom systems. In these experiments, participants were tasked with detecting events (threshold crossings) for multiple dials, each presenting a signal with different bandwidth. Senders' analyses showed a nearly linear relationship between signal bandwidth and the amount of attention paid to the dial, and he argued that humans sample according to bandwidth, in line with the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem. OBJECTIVE: The current study tested whether humans indeed sample the dials based on bandwidth alone or whether they also use salient peripheral cues. METHODS: A dial-monitoring task was performed by 33 participants. In half of the trials, a gaze-contingent window was used that blocked peripheral vision. RESULTS: The results showed that, without peripheral vision, humans do not effectively distribute their attention across the dials. The findings also suggest that, when given full view, humans can detect the speed of the dial using their peripheral vision. CONCLUSION: It is concluded that salience and bandwidth are both drivers of distributed visual attention in a dial-monitoring task. APPLICATION: The present findings indicate that salience plays a major role in guiding human attention. A subsequent recommendation for future human-machine interface design is that task-critical elements should be made salient.

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Cognitive control allows one to focus one's attention efficiently on relevant information while filtering out irrelevant information. This ability provides a means of rapid and effective learning, but using this control also brings risks. Importantly, useful information may be ignored and missed, and learners may fall into "learning traps" (e.g., learned inattention) wherein they fail to realize that what they ignore carries important information. Previous research has shown that adults may be more prone to such traps than young children, but the mechanisms underlying this difference are unclear. The current study used eye tracking to examine the role of attentional control during learning in succumbing to these learning traps. The participants, 4-year-old children and adults, completed a category learning task in which an unannounced switch occurred wherein the feature dimensions most relevant to correct categorization became irrelevant and formerly irrelevant dimensions became relevant. After the switch, adults were more likely than children to ignore the new highly relevant dimension and settle on a suboptimal categorization strategy. Furthermore, eye-tracking analyses reveal that greater attentional selectivity during learning (i.e., optimizing attention to focus only on the most relevant sources of information) predicted this tendency to miss important information later. Children's immature cognitive control, leading to broadly distributed attention, appears to protect children from this trap-although at the cost of less efficient and slower learning. These results demonstrate the double-edged sword of cognitive control and suggest that immature control may serve an adaptive function early in development.

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The activation of cognitive reserves and improved neuroplasticity of the brain, found as a result of cognitive training in the elderly, stimulate research in this direction due to the lack of consensus on the effectiveness of such an impact so far. To study the effect of information load during training of visual-spatial memory in conditions of distributed attention, the dynamics of memory and attention indicators was analyzed during ten training sessions in groups of twenty-year-old (GrY) and sixty-year-old (GrO) women. Regardless of the experimental conditions, the GrO differs from the GrY in the lower accuracy of hitting the target spatial spaced stimuli but similar indicators of attention concentration on the centrally located stimulus. An improvement in the accuracy of hitting spatially separated stimuli was found in the GrO only under relatively facilitated conditions of information selection: in the absence of distracting stimuli, while the GrY showed an increase in the efficiency of information selection during training with a greater cognitive load, i. e. with the presentation of distractors: an increase was found not only in the accuracy of getting into goal, but also concentration on the centrally presented stimulus. The results obtained indicate the need to select an individually optimal information load during cognitive training.

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When faced with situations where many people talk at once, individuals can employ different listening strategies to deal with the cacophony of speech sounds and to achieve different goals. In this fMRI study, we investigated how the pattern of neural activity is affected by the type of attention applied to speech in a simulated "cocktail party." Specifically, we compared brain activation patterns when listeners "attended selectively" to only one speaker and ignored all others, versus when they "distributed their attention" and followed several concurrent speakers. Conjunction analysis revealed a highly overlapping network of regions activated for both types of attention, including auditory association cortex (bilateral STG/STS) and frontoparietal regions related to speech processing and attention (bilateral IFG/insula, right MFG, left IPS). Activity within nodes of this network, though, was modulated by the type of attention required as well as the number of competing speakers. Auditory and speech-processing regions exhibited higher activity during distributed attention, whereas frontoparietal regions were activated more strongly during selective attention. These results suggest a common "attention to speech" network, which provides the computational infrastructure to deal effectively with multi-speaker input, but with sufficient flexibility to implement different prioritization strategies and to adapt to different listener goals.

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The visual system has a limited capacity for dealing with complex and redundant information in a scene. Here, we propose that a distributed attention mode of processing is necessary for coping with this limit, together with a focused attention mode of processing. The distributed attention mode provides a statistical summary of a scene, whereas the focused attention mode provides relevant information for object recognition. In this paper, we claim that a distributed mode of processing is necessary because (1) averaging performance improves with increased set-sizes, (2) even unselected items are likely to contribute to averaging, and (3) the assumption of variable capacity limits in averaging over different set-sizes is not plausible. We then propose how the averaging process can access multiple items over the capacity limit of focused attention. The visual system can represent multiple items as population responses and read out relevant information using the two modes of attention. It can summarize population responses with a broad application of a Gaussian profile (i.e., distributed attention) and represent its peak as the mean. It can focus on relevant population responses with a narrow application of a Gaussian profile (i.e., focused attention) and select important information for object recognition. The two attention modes of processing provide a framework for incorporating two seemingly opposing fields of study (ensemble perception and selective attention) and a unified theory of a coping strategy with our limited capacity.

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The visual system efficiently processes complex and redundant information in a scene despite its limited capacity. One strategy for coping with the complexity and redundancy of a scene is to summarize it by using average information. However, despite its importance, the mechanism of averaging is not well understood. Here, a distributed attention model of averaging is proposed. Human percept for an object can be disturbed by various sources of internal noise, which can occur either before (early noise) or after (late noise) forming an ensemble perception. The model assumes these noises and reflects noise cancellation by averaging multiple items. The model predicts increased precision for more items with decelerated increments for large set-sizes resulting from late noise. Importantly, the model incorporates mechanisms of attention, which modulate each item's contribution to the averaging process. The attention in the model also results in saturation of performance increments for small set-sizes because the amount of attention allocated to each item is greater for small set-sizes than for large set-sizes. To evaluate the proposed model, a psychophysical experiment was conducted in which observers' ability to discriminate average sizes of two displays was measured. The observers' averaging performance increased at a decreasing rate with small set-sizes and it approached an asymptote for large set-sizes. The model accurately predicted the observed pattern of data. It provides a theoretical framework for interpreting behavioral data and leads to an understanding of the characteristics of ensemble perception.

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Attention supports the allocation of resources to relevant locations and objects in a scene. Under most conditions, several stimuli compete for neural representation. Attention biases neural representation toward the response associated with the attended object [1, 2]. Therefore, an attended stimulus enjoys a neural response that resembles the response to that stimulus in isolation. Factors that determine and generate attentional bias have been researched, ranging from endogenously controlled processes to exogenous capture of attention [1-4]. Recent studies investigate the temporal structure governing attention. When participants monitor a single location, visual-target detection depends on the phase of an ∼8-Hz brain rhythm [5, 6]. When two locations are monitored, performance fluctuates at 4 Hz for each location [7, 8]. The hypothesis is that 4-Hz sampling for two locations may reflect a common sampler that operates at 8 Hz globally, which is divided between relevant locations [5-7, 9]. The present study targets two properties of this phenomenon, called rhythmic-attentional sampling: first, sampling is typically described for selection over different locations. We examined whether rhythmic sampling is limited to selection over space or whether it extends to feature-based attention. Second, we examined whether sampling at 4 Hz results from the division of an 8-Hz rhythm over two objects. We found that two overlapping objects defined by features are sampled at ∼4 Hz per object. In addition, performance on a single object fluctuated at 8 Hz. Rhythmic sampling of features did not result from temporal structure in eye movements.

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The ability to read depends on different cognitive skills. This study investigated the role of the main components of attention (selective attention, focused attention, distributed attention, and alternating attention) on the different dimensions of reading skills in novice readers. Participants were 288 Italian children, who attended the first year of primary school. Attention and reading skills (reading "comprehension," "accuracy," and "speed") were measured. Different components of attention influence each dimension of reading. Moreover, both the correctness and rapidity at which attention operates play a pivotal role in learning to read. Interestingly, selective attention is involved in all dimensions of reading. These findings may have educational and practical relevance. The early assessment of attention might favor the development of new strategies of intervention in dyslexic children and in children at risk of developing learning difficulties.