This weeks readings examined the effects of various disorders, brain damage, and cognitive problems on sustained attention and vigilance. The authors examined how knowledge of attention can help us understand more about the issues experienced by the participants they were examining. But the interesting question is can we use these paticular cases to learn more and make any generalizations and improvements on what we know about the mind and attention. Based on these readings it seems to me that the answer is no. In order to test the effects of brain legions or various disorders on an individual's attention studies need to be very specifically designed and monitored. For at least two of the studies I am not convinced that the results tell us anything particularly new or of interest.
The study that I found most mild and unassuming is Sayette et al.'s Lost in the Sauce: The Effects of Alcohol on Mind Wandering. The aim of this experiment was to examine the effects alcohol has on sustained attention. The researchers proposed that alcohol consumption would increase the number of TUTs exhibited by the individual and that it would make the individual less likely to notice or detect their mind wandering. They note, "environmental distractors can influence the impact of intoxication on emotion and behavior but in addition alcohol may affect sensitivity to distraction" (Sayette, 747). To test this the experimenters used two conditions: one in which the men participating in the study were given an alcoholic drink to consume and another in which the control group of men were served a placebo drink.
This study had a number of very well thought out design choices. For example using a placebo rather than a non drinking group was ideal. Likewise their control of the sex, weight, drug use, and food consumption of their participants was excellent. Additionally I thought that using both a probing and self report method in order to take note of how often the individuals caught themselves mind wandering versus were simply discovered to be mind wandering was a smart measure to take. Despite all these things I think that the amount of alcohol used in the experiment was hardly enough to test their theories. The drink that they gave their participants was exactly one standard drink. The BAC levels of the experimental group was well below the NYC intoxication driving limit, implying that the affects of the alcohol would be minor.
In terms of the performance on the comprehension task taken after the reading, the placebo group performed only "marginally" better than the drinking group. This peeked my interest. If the group performed just as well on the comprehension of War and Peace
then I don't really understand how there could have been such significant differences on actual mind wandering. I would be really interested in seeing a similar study done, perhaps with more alcohol (maybe in multiple stages) with the participants in an fMRI. The study done by Seyette doesn't seem to have enough answers to the questions he proposed and to the results he discovered. Particularly since the two groups were similar in the frequency with which he alcohol drinking participants reported TUTs was the same as placibo participants in spite of the fact that the former group was caught in those states a lot more often.
The way the researchers speak about alcohol decreasing perceptual abilities makes me think that perhaps there is a default/ standard way in which people percieve their mind wandering unless otherwise prompted. Meaning that unless individuals actively know that they are performing poorly on a task or are for some reason hyper aware of their thoughts and perceptions (which people who have consumed alcohol are not) perhaps we tend to report some seemingly average figure. And perhaps this ceases to be true after a significant amount of alcohol is consumed. If the person in the study we're intoxicated then wouldn't they perhaps be completely willing to say that they have mind wandered.
I was also disappointed by the lack of discussion regarding the social placebo effects of alcohol. By not having an additional group that were not given any sort of drink (placebo or not) I think the experimenters missed an opportunity to really examine the effects of social perception of drinking on sustained attention.
The article Depression, rumination and the default network by Berman et. al., while interesting did not seem to me like something that could be extrapolate to a wider understanding of Mind Wandering but rather a very specific, if sometimes incomplete, look at depression. As the article went on I actually felt that we were focusing more on learning more about the default network than specifically depressed individuals and their behavior when it comes to sustained attention tasks and the default network. This distracted me. I felt that it was not really in the interests of the questions the study was posing and that it was loosing track of the question it sought to explore. Early in the paper Berman et. al. state that " examining how individuals with MDD and healthy controls compare during such rest periods is important because interleaved with ongoing tasks of like are significant periods in which people do not engage in structured tasks, and instead are left to mind wander or ruminate" (Berman 448). By design the study is intended to explore this issue.
The experiemnters took a sample of depressed individuals and first tested their non-task fixation periods. This was done at the beginning and end of each run and is one of the most significant part of the experiments since it demonstrates that there was more default network connectivity during unguided rest periods.
The following is a depiction of the activity in MDDs and HCs (healthy controls):
Overall what this study tells us is that when working on task MDDs and HCs essentially show the same activity. The major differences are seen when the individuals are at rest. So it is possible that there is a connection between and highly active Default Network and rumination in depression. However a major issue for me here is the direction of this correlation. There is also an issue with just placing MDDs in one category. There are several common characteristics of depression but the behavior of each MDD is not necessarily the same and the interaction between those characteristics and the studies of rumination that the researchers took is not quite satisfactory to be a point of making big generalizations. What is really promising about this research is that indicates that there might be reason to have more behavioral therapy for depression rather than, or in addition to, drugs.
The article Default Mode Network Connectivity Predicts Sustained Attention Deficits after Traumatic Brain Injury by Bonnelle et. al. was a fascinating read. I was really interested by the fact that before a task is even performed the amount of connectivity of the precuneus with the rest of the DMN can indicate which patients will show impairment of attention. If any article had applications beyond the study of disorders of the mind and attention, it was this one. The design is still very specific and oriented toward a very specific scope but studying of the correlation between those brain regions in healthy controls as well as possibly in the developing brains of children could help psychologists lean more about what sustain attention works in opposition to in the mind.
When the experimenters ran their study they found that the vigilance decrement in their experimental patients varied while the ones of the controls were fairly consistent. Besides being interesting in its own right this fact gives me courage that the applications of the discoveries made on these individuals brains might be more widely applicable.
Finally the article by Manly et. al. "The Differential Assessment of Children's Attention: The Test of Everyday Attention for Children" was an important step to make in terms of research areas. However it really just demonstrated how difficult it is to examine the children's minds. This article was perhaps the one that would be most difficult to generalize from. To begin with the minds of developing children are very complex in nature. And studying attention in children is particularly difficult. Even with adults attention is hard to isolate because as humans we are constantly attending to something. Therefore it might be even more true for the learning and developing brain of a child. The biggest danger here is I think to try and compare the children's results to anything we have encountered so far in the class with adults. (At least in a definite and certain way).
I had questions about the tasks that the children were asked to perform. In one instance they are asked to do a tone counting experiment. From what we have learned in the past increasing the working memory load of an participant will keep him or her from mind wandering. If we assume that this is true of children's minds as well this task is flawed by asking the child to keep something in their wokring memory. While it is not a very complex computation, I do not feel adequtly reassured that this wouldn't have an affect on the children in the study.
This and other of the studies we looked at for this week have hade me question their design. It is difficult to design an experiment for an abnormal mind in a similar if not more complex way that for a healthy one. Each have very specific needs and requirements, must have certain controls and tests, and may not really be looking for the same things. Many advances have been made in psychology through case studies or pseudo-experiments with atypical minds and traumatic brain injuries but no definite conclusions can really be drawn on the basis of one study. At most it is a opening to delve deeper into the field and the particular topic of interest.
References:
Berman MarcG., Peltire, Scott., Nee, Derek Evans., Kross, Ethan., Deldin, Patricia J., Jonides, John. (2011). "Depression, rumination and the default network." SCAN: 6 548 - 555.
Bonnel, Valerir., Leech, Robert., Kinnuen, Krisi M., Ham, Tim E., Beckmann, Christian F., Boissezon, Xavier, De., Greenwood, Richard J., Sharp, David j.. (2011) "Default Mode Network Connectivity Predicts Sustained Attention Deficits after Traumatic Brain Injury." The Journal of Neuroscience: 31 13442-13451.
Manly Tom, Nimmo-Smith, Ian., Watson, peter., Andersn, Vicki., Turner, Anna., Robertson, Ian H. (2001). "The Differential Assessment of Children's Attention: The test of Everyday Attention for Children". Child Psychology 42 1065- 1081.
Sayette, Michael A., Reichel, Eric D., Schooler, Jonathan W. (2009).
"Lost in the Sauce: The Effects of Alcohol on Mind Wandering." Psychological Science 20 747 - 752
