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...t as well as several additional items), the effect of an extraneous distractor on performance is minimal. This finding is incorporated in the load theory of selective attention and cognitive control (=-=Lavie, 2005-=-; Lavie et al., 2004). Relatively easy perceptual tasks do not require all of one’s attentional resources to reach adequate behavioral performance. In this case, the resources left over from the task ...

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...on took place. Reinstatement of the conditioned fear response can occur following re-exposure to the US. Renewal of the conditioned fear response can occur if the CS is presented in a different context to that used for extinction, especially if this is the context in which CS–US pairings were initially established. Perceptual load: the demand or load placed upon perceptual processing is held to become higher when the number of different-identity items that need to be perceived is increased and/or, for the same number of items, when perceptual identification is made more demanding on attention [59]. State and trait anxiety: state anxiety refers to current levels of anxiety and trait anxiety refers to the disposition to experience anxiety across multiple time points. In the human literature these are measured bymeans of self-report questionnaires that primarily assess symptoms of hyperarousal and worry.Corresponding author: Bishop, S.J. (sb445@cam.ac.uk). Available online xxxxxx. www.sciencedirect.com 1364-6613/$ – see front matter 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2007.05.008 Please cite this article in press as: Bishop, S.J., Neurocognitive mechanisms of anxi...

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... and Shulman, 2002; Reynolds et al., 2000; Shomstein and Yantis, 2004; Treue, 2001; Treue and Martinez Trujillo, 1999; Wager et al., 2004), or to suppress activity in regions which process irrelevant or competing inputs (Shulman et al., 1997; Smith et al., 2000). Table 1 provides additional illustrations of top-down effects. Importantly, such top-down mechanisms consume cognitive resources as demonstrated, for example, by the increased processing of distractors or irrelevant information in situations in which such resources are highly taxed by extensive demands on cognitive control processes (Lavie, 2005; O'Connor et al., 2002). The activation and orchestration of such top-down mechanism are assumed to underlie the ability to stabilize or regain attentional performance under challenging conditions and as a function of incentives (Butter, 2004; Small et al., 2005). Below, we will discuss the evidence that suggests a prominent role of cortical cholinergic inputs to prefrontal regions in activating such top-down mechanisms, indicating the possibility that prefrontal modulation of cholinergic activity in somatosensory cortical regions contributes to the mediation of top-down effects, particularly...

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...adults’ tendency to favor positive faces and pictures more than negative faces and pictures. Consistent with previous research showing that high cognitive load can increase distractor processing (see =-=Lavie, 2005-=-, for a review), goal-irrelevant information received more visual attention when older participants performed the distraction task. These findings support the hypothesis that, in addition to chronical...

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...n mechanisms by using ERP, motivated by the partly conflicting findings in the previous literature. One way to examine such bipartite comparison systems is to manipulate the cognitive load of a task (=-=Lavie, 2005-=-; Lavie, Hirst, de Fockert, & Viding, 2004; Lavie & Tsal, 1994). We hypothesized that increasing cognitive load (utilizing the distance effect) would lead to a shift from separate processing of physic...

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...e on tasks of low perceptual load (e.g., involving just one relevant stimulus), such distractor interference is eliminated on tasks of higher perceptual load (e.g., involving six or more stimuli; see =-=Lavie, 2005-=-, for a review). To examine how this theory relates to distractibility in everyday life, we assessed how the effects of perceptual load on an individual’s magnitude of distraction in the laboratory re...

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...he current behavioral goals, and therefore, endogenous mechanisms are also playing a role in the so-called involuntary control of attention. Also, the amount of distraction can be modulated by cognitive load on selective attention tasks (Lavie, Hirst, De Fockert, & Viding, 2004). In these experiments, the independence of involuntary responses from the available cognitive resources (i.e., its automaticity) was tested under different conditions of working memory (WM) load, resulting in increased distraction in conditions of larger WM load. Converging evidence is provided by a number of studies (Lavie, 2005; Lavie & De Fockert, 2005; Yi, Woodman, Widders, Marois, & Chun, 2004; De Fockert, Rees, Frith, & Lavie, 2001; for a review, see Lavie et al., 2004). From these results, it is evident that automatic attentional mechanisms are not independent from the available processing resources. The general conclusion that stems from all these arguments is that endogenous and exogenous attention mechanisms indeed interact when controlling the focus of attention, but it remains unclear how this interaction takes place. A clear link between attentional control and WM seems to emerge, with the evidence pointi...