September 2019
Volume 19, Issue 10
Open Access
Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting Abstract  |   September 2019
Selective Attention Desynchronizes Automatic Movements
Author Affiliations & Notes
  • Xilei Zhang
    School of Biological Sciences and Medical Engineering, Southeast University
    Key Laboratory of Child Development and Learning Sciences of Ministry of Education, China
    Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
  • Wenming Zheng
    School of Biological Sciences and Medical Engineering, Southeast University
    Key Laboratory of Child Development and Learning Sciences of Ministry of Education, China
  • Xiangyong Yuan
    Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Journal of Vision September 2019, Vol.19, 109. doi:https://doi.org/10.1167/19.10.109
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      Xilei Zhang, Wenming Zheng, Xiangyong Yuan; Selective Attention Desynchronizes Automatic Movements. Journal of Vision 2019;19(10):109. https://doi.org/10.1167/19.10.109.

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      © ARVO (1962-2015); The Authors (2016-present)

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Abstract

Most daily acts, like sequential finger tapping and typewriting, are conducted with rare (if any) attentional or conscious guidance. Whereas, such automaticity must be available for revamp by deliberate attention in order to learn new skills. It yet remains elusive that attention may interact with automatic movements. Here we tackled this issue by quantifying the fast finger tapping movement to examine how selective attention interfere with automaticity. For Participants (N=16 for each experiment, all right-handed), tapping movements were recorded by 60HZ cameras and trajectories of the right-hand fingertips were extracted by DeepLabCut (Mathis et al., 2018), a video-based pose estimation toolbox. In Exp1 we used a dual-task paradigm to examine the effect of covert attention on automatic movement. While participants were watching the visual display and continuously tapping by four fingers, their covert attention were required to be allocated on the movement of the index finger (INDEX), the middle finger (MID), evenly distributed across all moving fingers (WHOLE) or exclusively on the letter counting task only (CTRL). Results reveal that 1) inter-finger synchrony was highest in CTRL, lowest in WHOLE, and intermediate in INDEX and MID. 2) inter-trial synchrony was reduced for all the attended fingers in INDEX, MID and WHOLE relative to the CTRL, and no significant changes were found for unattended fingers. All these effects have been well replicated in Exp2, in which we further examined the effect of overt attention by intentionally keeping eyes on the target finger(s) while neglecting the others. Exp3 further concluded that these effects cannot be artifacts of conceptual priming of targeted finger(s) since attending to the finger labels in the working memory instead of the movement while tapping made no attentional effects. Taken together, evidences here indicate intrinsic interactions between attentional allocation and automatic movements.

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