Craig Hedge

Cardiff University | CU · School of Psychology

The broad construct of impulsivity is one that spans both personality and cognitive ability. Despite a common overarching construct, previous research has found no relationship between self-report measures of impulsivity and people's ability to inhibit pre-potent responses. Here, we use evidence accumulation models of choice reaction time tasks to...

Attentional control as an ability to regulate information processing during goal-directed behavior is critical to many theories of human cognition and thought to predict a large range of everyday behaviors. However, in recent years, failures to reliably assess individual differences in attentional control have sparked a debate concerning whether at...

Abstract Aims Across three eye‐tracking studies, we examined how cigarette pack features affected visual attention and self‐reported avoidance of and reactance to warnings. Design Study 1: smoking status × warning immediacy (short‐term vs. long‐term health consequences) × warning location (top vs. bottom of pack). Study 2: smoking status × warning...

Aims Across three eye‐tracking studies, we examined how cigarette pack features affected visual attention and self‐reported avoidance of and reactance to warnings. Design Study 1: smoking status × warning immediacy (short‐term vs. long‐term health consequences) × warning location (top vs. bottom of pack). Study 2: smoking status × warning framing...

Background Persistent postural perceptual dizziness (PPPD) is a common chronic condition presenting in neurology and neuro-otology clinics. Symptoms lie on a spectrum in the general population. The cause is unknown and thought to involve interactions between visual and vestibular systems, but symptoms also correlate with anxiety and migraine.Object...

Aims: Across three eye-tracking studies, we examined how the location, framing, immediacy, and severity of health warnings on branded cigarette packs affected visual attention and self-reported avoidance of and reactance to warnings. Design: Study 1: smoking status × warning immediacy (short-term vs. long-term) × warning location (top of back vs. b...

Speed-accuracy trade-offs are often considered a confound in speeded choice tasks, but individual differences in strategy have been linked to personality and brain structure. We ask whether strategic adjustments in response caution are reliable, and whether they correlate across tasks and with impulsivity traits. In Study 1, participants performed...

Any repeatedly performed action is characterized by endogenous variability, affecting both speed and accuracy-for a large part presumably caused by fluctuations in underlying brain and body states. The current research questions concerned (a) whether such states are accessible to us and (b) whether we can act upon this information to reduce variabi...

Executive function (EF) decline is a consistent early sign of Alzheimer's disease (AD) among adults with Down syndrome (DS), which means that baseline measures of EF for individuals with DS are vital to allow detection of meaningful decline. We developed a framework to extract measures of three core components of EF (memory updating, inhibitory, an...

Objective: Research using cognitive or perceptual tasks in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often relies on mean reaction time (RT) and accuracy derived from alternative-forced choice paradigms. However, these measures can confound differences in task-related processing efficiency with caution (i.e., preference for speed or accuracy). We examined wh...

Any repeatedly performed action is characterised by endogenous variability, affecting both speed and accuracy - for a large part presumably caused by fluctuations in underlying brain and body states. The current research questions were: 1) whether such states are accessible to us, and 2) whether we can act upon this information to reduce variabilit...

Older adults tend to have slower response times (RTs) than younger adults on cognitive tasks. This makes the examination of domain-specific deficits in aging difficult, as differences between conditions in raw RTs (RT costs) typically increase with slower average RTs. Here, we examine the mapping between 2 established approaches to dealing with thi...

The underpinning assumption of much research on cognitive individual differences (or group differences) is that task performance indexes cognitive ability in that domain. In many tasks performance is measured by differences (costs) between conditions, which are widely assumed to index a psychological process of interest rather than extraneous facto...

Background: Alcohol impairs response inhibition; however, it remains contested whether such impairments affect a general inhibition system, or whether affected inhibition systems are embedded in, and specific to, each response modality. Further, alcohol-induced impairments have not been disambiguated between proactive and reactive inhibition mecha...

Individual differences in cognitive paradigms are increasingly employed to relate cognition to brain structure, chemistry, and function. However, such efforts are often unfruitful, even with the most well established tasks. Here we offer an explanation for failures in the application of robust cognitive paradigms to the study of individual differen...

Action decisions are considered an emergent property of competitive response activations. As such, decision mechanisms are embedded in, and therefore may differ between, different response modalities. Despite this, the saccadic eye movement system is often promoted as a model for all decisions, especially in the fields of electrophysiology and mode...

Previous work has examined whether immersive technologies can benefit learning in virtual environments, but the potential benefits of technology in this context are confounded by individual differences such as spatial ability. We assessed spatial knowledge acquisition in male and female participants using a technology not previously examined empiri...

Context: Developed by Jacobson and Truax, the reliable change index (RCI) provides a measure of whether the change in an individual's score over time is within or beyond that which might be accounted for by measurement variability. In combination with measures of whether an individual's final score is closer to those of one population or another,...

We examined the relationship between the attentional selection of perceptual information and of information in working memory (WM) through four experiments, using a spatial WM-updating task. Participants remembered the locations of two objects in a matrix and worked through a sequence of updating operations, each mentally shifting one dot to a new...

Automatic detection of environmental change is a core component of attention. The mismatch negativity (MMN), an electrophysiological marker of this mechanism, has been studied prominently in the auditory domain, with cortical generators identified in temporal and frontal regions. Here, we combined electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magneti...

Previous research with adults and adolescents indicates that plain cigarette packs increase visual attention to health warnings among non-smokers and non-regular smokers, but not among regular smokers. This may be because regular smokers: (1) are familiar with the health warnings, (2) preferentially attend to branding, or (3) actively avoid health...

To robustly examine the prevalence of the double peaked P1 visual evoked potential in healthy younger and older adult populations. The evoked potentials and spectral power changes to simple visual stimuli of 26 healthy younger (M=20.0y) and 26 healthy older adults (M=76.0y) were examined. Group and individual analyses showed a clear effect of age o...

The neural generators of visual mismatch: A shared frontal generator across modalities Craig Hedge1, George Stothart1, Jenna Todd Jones1, Priscila Rojas Frias1, Kristopher Magee1, Ute Leonards1, Nina Kazanina1, Elanor Hinton1,2, Jamila Andoh1,2, Jade Thai1,2, Jonathan Brooks1,2;1University of Bristol, 2Bristol Clinical Research and Imaging Centre...

Updating object locations in working memory (WM) is faster when the same object is updated twice in a row compared to updating another object. In analogy to repetition priming effects in perceptual attention, this object-switch cost in WM is thought of as being due to the necessity to shift attention internally from one object to another. However,...

One of the most recent additions to the range of Immersive Virtual Environments has been the digital fulldome. However, not much empirical research has been conducted to explore its potential and benefits over other types of presentation formats. In this review we provide a framework within which to examine the properties of fulldome environments a...