Mobile EEG identifies the re-allocation of attention during real-world activity
Date
01/11/2019Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
The distribution of attention between competing processing demands can have dramatic real-world consequences, however little is known about how limited attentional resources are distributed during real-world behaviour. Here we employ mobile EEG to characterise the allocation of attention across multiple sensory-cognitive processing demands during naturalistic movement. We used a neural marker of attention, the Event-Related Potential (ERP) P300 effect, to show that attention to targets is reduced when human participants walk compared to when they stand still. In a second experiment, we show that this reduction in attention is not caused by the act of walking per se. A third experiment identified the independent processing demands driving reduced attention to target stimuli during motion. ERP data reveals that the reduction in attention seen during walking reflects the linear and additive sum of the processing demands produced by visual and inertial stimulation. The mobile cognition approach used here shows how limited resources are precisely re-allocated according to the sensory processing demands that occur during real-world behaviour.
Citation
Ladouce , S , Donaldson , D I , Dudchenko , P A & Ietswaart , M 2019 , ' Mobile EEG identifies the re-allocation of attention during real-world activity ' , Scientific Reports , vol. 9 , 15851 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-51996-y
Publication
Scientific Reports
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2045-2322Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © The Author(s) 2019. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Description
S.L., M.I. and D.I.D. are members of the SINAPSE collaboration (www.sinapse.ac.uk), a pooling initiative funded by the Scottish Funding Council and the Chief Scientific Office of the Scottish Executive.Collections
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