Juan Lupiáñez

• PhD
• Master's Student at University of Granada

In a series of studies (Manini et al., 2021), we investigated how task performance is affected by fully irrelevant distractors (i.e. sharing neither features nor space with the target) vs. potentially relevant distractors (i.e. sharing features and space with it) as a function of the search context/perceptual load. Although the effects of both kind...

Stimuli that reliably predict reward can capture attention. Value‑Modulated Attentional Capture (VMAC) is typically viewed as independent of task goals or physical salience, arising from Pavlovian learning. However, recent evidence suggests that the awareness of the stimulus‑reward contingency may be necessary during the acquisition of such attenti...

Sustained attention is crucial for daily functioning, yet research on vigilance development has yielded inconsistent findings. These discrepancies arise partly from the use of tasks with different vigilance demands and from limitations in the indices of sensitivity and response criterion used. This study examines vigilance development in a large sa...

A tendency to procrastinate has previously been linked to low attentional control and poor emotion regulation skills. Building upon these findings, in the present study we investigated whether the relationship between procrastination and attention can be corroborated and explained by emotion dysregulation and dispositional spontaneous mind-wanderin...

Perceptual load theory (Forster & Lavie, 2008) is a key framework in visual attention research, demonstrating that under high-load conditions, fully irrelevant distractors are no longer processed and do not disrupt task performance. In our recent work (Manini et al., 2025), we replicated this effect. However, we also found that under high load, the...

Mindfulness meditation has drawn increasing attention in psychological research over the past two decades, including growing interest in its potential cognitive benefits. Meta-analytic evidence suggests that mindfulness training might improve cognitive performance, but the mechanisms underlying these benefits have not been fully characterised. In t...

To successfully perform everyday activities, cognitive functions such as working memory (WM) and selective attention are necessary. Specifically, when environmental demands are dynamic, exogenous attention is crucial. However, its ability to select and prioritize not only perceptual spatial locations, but also novel stimulus-response (S-R) bindings...

Perceptual load theory (Forster & Lavie, 2008) is a key framework in visual attention research, demonstrating that under high-load conditions, fully irrelevant distractors are no longer processed and do not disrupt task performance. In our recent work (Manini et al., 2025), we replicated this effect. However, we also found that under high load, the...

Value-modulated attentional capture (VMAC) refers to a process by which a priori neutral stimuli gain attentional priority when associated with reward, independently of goal or stimulus-driven attentional control. Although VMAC is considered an automatic and implicit process, the role of awareness of the stimulus-reward contingency on its learning...

Introduction The aim of the present research was to examine the role of affective information in the functioning of attentional networks in individuals with high vs. low trait or state anxiety. Previous studies suggest that anxiety can influence attentional processes, but the impact of affective information, such as alerting emotional stimuli, on t...

Entrainment theories propose that attention inherently oscillates between moments of attentional enhancement and disengagement. Consequently, perceptual and response benefits have been reported in tasks with a rhythmic structure. In the present study, we report two preregistered auditory experiments attempting to replicate previous supporting behav...

The effects of physical exercise on attentional performance have received considerable interest in recent years. Most of previous studies that assessed the effect of an acute bout of exercise on attentional performance have generally been approached by analysing single attentional functions in isolation, thus ignoring the functioning of other atten...

Real-world environments are complex, demanding a diverse set of cognitive functions such as attention and working memory (WM) to perform adaptive behaviors. However, exogenous attention, characterized as automatic and involuntary, has primarily been studied by focusing on spatial perception. In particular, the ability of pure exogenous retro-cues t...

Recent studies employing the spatial interference paradigm reveal qualitative differences in congruency effects between gaze and arrow targets. Typically, arrows produce a standard congruency effect (SCE), with faster responses when target direction aligns with its location. Conversely, gaze targets often lead to a reversed congruency effect (RCE),...

According to the arousal model of vigilance, the locus coeruleus‐norepinephrine (LC‐NE) system modulates sustained attention over long periods by regulating physiological arousal. Recent research has proposed that transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) modulates indirect physiological markers of LC‐NE activity, although its effect...

Halperin and Schulz’s neurodevelopmental model postulates that the onset of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in childhood is due to subcortical alterations, whereas the disorder’s trajectory into adulthood depends on the development of executive functions. Based on a dimensional framework of ADHD, Coll-Martín et al. (2021) found supp...

Entrainment theories, such as the Dynamic Attending Theory, extend this idea by proposing that attention acts as an oscillatory system that alternates between moments of attentional enhancement and instants of attentional disengagement. Consequently, perceptual and response benefits have been reported in tasks with a rhythmic structure, presumably...

Access to musical training depends on various factors, such as socioeconomic status and musical background of families, and the child's interest in learning music (related to their openness to experience). In the present study, we show an additional source of selection bias that has gone unnoticed: the relative age of children within the same cohor...

Stimuli associated with rewards are more likely to attract attention, a phenomenon often referred to as value-modulated attentional capture (VMAC). VMAC is widely assumed to be implicit. However, the role of explicit awareness of reward-stimulus contingencies has mostly been assessed using post-hoc awareness tests, which are known to be prone to ma...

To successfully perform everyday activities, cognitive functions such as working memory (WM) and selective attention must be triggered. Specifically, when environmental demands are dynamic, exogenous attention is crucial. However, its ability to select and prioritize not only perceptual spatial locations, but also novel stimulus-response (S-R) bind...

To successfully perform everyday activities, cognitive functions such as working memory (WM) and selective attention are necessary. Specifically, when environmental demands are dynamic, exogenous attention is crucial. However, its ability to select and prioritize not only perceptual spatial locations, but also novel stimulus-response (S-R) bindings...

Value-modulated attentional capture (VMAC) refers to a process by which a priori neutral stimuli gain attentional priority when associated with reward, independently of goal or stimulus-driven attentional control. Although VMAC is considered an automatic and implicit process, the role of awareness of the stimulus-reward contingency on its learning...

Salient stimuli automatically attract attention, leading to facilitation effects, but later reduce the likelihood that attention will be recaptured at the same location or by the same object, a phenomenon known as inhibition of return (IOR). Interestingly, IOR is a modulable phenomenon in response to different manipulations of both cue and target....

Recent evidence suggests that musical practice could be a promising cognitive training activity that could promote attentional functioning. However, findings with adult samples have shown that musical training might have a specific impact only over some attentional processes (e.g., phasic alertness, sustained attention, and vigilance). On the other...

According to the arousal model of vigilance, the locus coeruleus-norepinephrine (LC-NE) system modulates sustained attention over long periods by regulating physiological arousal. Recent research has proposed that transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) modulates indirect physiological markers of LC-NE activity, although its effect...

Máster Universitario en Profesorado de Enseñanza Secundaria Obligatoria, Bachillerato, Formación Profesional y Enseñanza de Idiomas (MAES - UNIA). Esta publicación incluye solamente el módulo genérico y el prácticum de la colección. El Título de Máster de Profesorado en la Universidad Internacional de Andalucía atiende a la demanda de estudiantes q...

Maintaining vigilance is essential for many everyday tasks, but over time, our ability to sustain it inevitably decreases, potentially entailing severe consequences. High-definition transcranial direct current stimulation (HD-tDCS) has proven to be useful for studying and improving vigilance. This study explores if/how cognitive load affects the mi...

The effects of physical exercise on attentional performance have received considerable interest in recent years. Most of previous studies that assessed the effect of an acute bout of exercise on attentional performance have generally been approached by analysing single attentional functions in isolation, thus ignoring the functioning of other atten...

Stimuli predicting rewards are more likely to capture attention, even when they are not relevant to our current goals. Individual differences in value-modulated attentional capture (VMAC) have been associated with various psychopathological conditions in the scientific literature. However, the claim that this attentional bias can predict individual...

A tendency to procrastinate has been previously linked to low attentional control and poor emotion regulation skills. Building upon on these findings, in the present study we investigated whether the relationship between procrastination and attention can be mediated by emotion dysregulation and dispositional mind-wandering. Participants completed q...

La música es, para la gran mayoría de personas, fundamental en sus vidas. Nos aporta grandes beneficios, muchos de ellos relacionados con nuestra atención. Debido a su dimensión emocional, la música afecta al sistema de redes atencionales, ayudándonos a desenvolvernos en nuestro entorno e influyendo en nuestra manera de atender. Ante el natural det...

Social and nonsocial directional stimuli (such as gaze and arrows, respectively) share their ability to trigger attentional processes, although the issue of whether social stimuli generate other additional (and unique) attentional effects is still under debate. In this study, we used the spatial interference paradigm to explore, using functional ma...

We present here the ANTI-Vea platform (ANTI-Vea-UGR; https://anti-vea.ugr.es/index.php). It is a free public website that our team has developed for online collecting and analyzing data obtained with the Attentional Network Test for Interactions and Vigilance – executive and arousal components (ANTI-Vea), and its different subversions. Using this t...

The Attentional Networks Test for Interactions and Vigilance—executive and arousal components (ANTI-Vea) is a computerized task of 32 min duration in the standard format. The task simultaneously assesses the main effects and interactions of the three attentional networks (i.e., phasic alertness, orienting, and executive control) and two dissociated...

Retrospective attention is involuntarily or voluntarily oriented to working memory (WM) contents. Previous research has not assessed voluntary attention ruling out the effects of involuntary attention. Furthermore, it is unknown whether the voluntariness of attention impacts differently on perceptual and semantic WM contents. To address this, react...

While there is ample evidence for the ability to selectively attend to where in space and when in time a relevant event might occur, it remains poorly understood whether spatial and temporal attention operate independently or interactively to optimize behavior. To elucidate this important issue, we provide a narrative review of the literature inves...

The Attentional Networks Test for Interactions and Vigilance–executive and arousal components (ANTI-Vea) is a computerized task of 32 min duration in the standard format. The task simultaneously assesses the main effects and interactions of the three attentional networks (i.e., phasic alertness, orienting, and executive control) and two dissociated...

A gaze is a complex stimulus that provides valuable social information during human interactions. It shares the ability to orient attention with other directional stimuli, such as arrows, but, still, gaze generates unique effects. A clear example was found using a spatial interference task (Marotta et al, 2018). Participants had to identify the dir...

Rhythmic contexts are ubiquitous in our lives, influencing our behavior significantly. Music, dance, speech, and even natural events such as sea waves have an inherent temporal structure, understood as rhythms. The Dynamic Attending Theory (DAT) states that attention can be entrained to external rhythms, enhancing our behavior in terms of preparati...

Halperin and Schulz's neurodevelopmental model postulates that the onset of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in childhood is due to subcortical alterations, whereas the disorder trajectory into adulthood depends on the development of executive functions. Based on a dimensional framework of ADHD, Coll-Martín et al. (2021) found suppor...

Vigilance is the challenging ability to maintain attention during long periods. When performing prolonged tasks, vigilance failures are often observed, reflecting a decrease in performance. Previous research has shown that changes in oscillatory rhythms are associated with states of vigilance loss. The present study aimed to investigate whether cha...

Attention is regulated by three independent but interacting networks, that is, alerting, comprising phasic alertness and vigilance, orienting, and executive control. Previous studies analyzing event‐related potentials (ERPs) associated with attentional networks have focused on phasic alertness, orienting, and executive control, without an independe...

Visual processes are assumed to be affected by scene-object semantics throughout the stream of processing, from the earliest processes of conscious object detection to the later stages of object identification and memory encoding. However, very few studies have jointly explored these processes in a unified setting. In this study, we build upon a ch...

Numerous studies have shown that eye-gaze and arrows automatically shift visuospatial attention. Nonetheless, it remains unclear whether the attentional shifts triggered by these two types of stimuli differ in some important aspects. It has been suggested that an important difference may reside in how people select objects in response to these two...

Categorical processes allow us to make sense of the environment effortlessly by grouping stimuli sharing relevant features. Although these processes occur in both social and non-social contexts, motivational, affective and epistemic factors specific to the social world may motivate individuation over categorisation of social compared to non-social...

Vigilance-maintaining a prolonged state of preparation to detect and respond to specific yet unpredictable environmental changes-usually decreases across prolonged tasks, causing potentially severe real-life consequences, which could be mitigated through transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). The present study aimed at replicating previous...

Research has shown that more efficient executive control (EC) is related to reduced expression of social biases, and this relation is influenced by participants’ motivation to respond without prejudice. Previous studies have shown that some forms of life experience are linked to more efficient EC. One such type of experience is bilingualism. Can th...

Classical theoretical models suggest that visual short-term memory can be divided in two main memory systems: sensory memory, a short-lasting but high-capacity memory storage and working memory, a long-lasting but low-capacity memory store. Whilst, previous research has systematically shown a strong interplay between attentional mechanisms and work...

Objectives Mind-wandering is a form of internal distraction that may occur both deliberately and spontaneously. This study aimed to provide a psychometric evaluation of the Spanish version of the Mind-Wandering Deliberate and Spontaneous (MW-D/MW-S) scales, as well as to extend prior research investigating their associations with dispositional mind...

Gaze acts from an early age as a cue to orient attention and, thereafter, to infer our social partners' intentions, thoughts, and emotions. Variants of the attentional orienting paradigm have been used to study the orienting capabilities associated to eye gaze. However, to date, it is still unclear whether this methodology truly assesses “social-sp...

Multiple theories have used perceptual sensitivity and response criterion indices to explain the decrements in performance across time on task (i.e., vigilance decrement). In a recent study, McCarley and Yamani (2021) offered conceptual and methodological advances to this debate by using a vigilance task that parametrically manipulates noise and si...

The literature on musical training suggests benefits of this activity on auditory skills (i.e., near transfer) and general cognitive abilities (i.e., far transfer). However, other positions have taken those results more skeptically, rather arguing that studies with positive outcomes suffer from methodological issues that impede inferences of causal...

Durante un largo tiempo se ha considerado el trastorno por déficit de atención e hiperactividad (TDAH) como un trastorno del desarrollo, lo que en última instancia supone aceptar que las personas adultas que lo padecen lo llevarían arrastrando desde la infancia. Sin embargo, estudios longitudinales han puesto de manifiesto no solo que el TDAH puede...

Previous research shows that anodal HD-tDCS over the rPPC mitigates the decrement of executive vigilance (EV)—maintaining a prolonged state of preparation to detect/respond to specific, yet unpredictable environmental changes (Luna et al., 2020). This effect seems to be mediated by the alpha:gamma power ratio (Hemmerich et al., in preparation). The...

Bearing in mind that cognitive control is a complex function that includes several processes, it is not clear exactly which ones deteriorate with age. In fact, controversial results have been found. For example, some studies indicate that age-related deficits are observed in proactive and not in reactive control, others show that it is reactive con...

Implicit sequence learning represents an established paradigm to investigate incidental skill acquisition in a laboratory environment. During a covert task, participants respond to the location of a target appearing over a series of locations according to a complex sequence, which gets violated in a reduced set of control trials. Even though partic...

Subtle to no attentional differences have been broadly observed when using gaze and arrows as orienting cues. However, recent studies have found opposite effects when they are used as targets in spatial interference tasks, with arrows eliciting faster responses when their position is congruent with the indicated direction and gaze producing faster...

Objectives: Mind-wandering is a form of internal distraction that may occur both deliberately and spontaneously. This study aimed to provide a psychometric evaluation of the Spanish version of the Mind-Wandering Deliberate and Spontaneous (MW-D/MW-S) scales, as well as to extend prior research investigating their associations with dispositional min...

Gaze acts from an early age as a cue to orient attention and, thereafter, to infer our social partners' intentions, thoughts, and emotions. Variants of the attentional orienting paradigm have been used to study the orienting capabilities associated to eye gaze. However, to date, it is still unclear whether this methodology truly assesses an attribu...

Desde el nacimiento, los bebés muestran un interés especial por la mirada. Esta revela información sobre el pensamiento y el comportamiento de los demás, siendo una clave esencial en el desarrollo social. Pero, dado que otros estímulos no sociales, como las flechas, también orientan la atención, ¿qué hace tan especial a la mirada? Entender su singu...

La vigilancia está presente en un sinfín de tareas que implican mantener la atención durante periodos prolongados que conllevan una pérdida progresiva de rendimiento a lo largo del tiempo (decremento en vigilancia). Podemos distinguir entre la vigilancia de arousal (VA), que supone mantener un estado de activación para responder de manera relativam...

Objectives Research addressing the relationship between dispositional mindfulness and objective attention performance remains inconclusive, partly because previous studies used sample sizes possibly leading to underpowered designs. Here, we examined this relationship in a large sample using the ANTI-Vea: a novel cognitive-behavioral task that simul...

A decrease in vigilance over time is often observed when performing prolonged tasks, a phenomenon known as “vigilance decrement.” The present study aimed at testing some of the critical predictions of the resource-control theory about the vigilance decrement. Specifically, the theory predicts that the vigilance decrement is mainly due to a drop in...

Multiple theories have used the indices of the signal detection theory (SDT) to explain vigilance decrement. A recent study by McCarley and Yamani offered conceptual and methodological advances to this debate by using a vigilance task that parametrically manipulates noise and signal, and analyzes the outcomes with psychometric curves. In the presen...

Background: We investigated whether individuals with high levels of autistic traits integrate relevant communicative signals, such as facial expression, when decoding eye-gaze direction. Methods: Students with high vs. low scores on the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) performed a task in which they responded to the eye directions of faces, present...

Arrows and gaze stimuli lead to opposite spatial congruency effects. While standard congruency effects are observed for arrows (faster responses for congruent conditions), responses are faster when eye-gaze stimuli are presented on the opposite side of the gazed-at location (incongruent trials), leading to a reversed congruency effect (RCE). Here,...

Previous research has shown opposite effects of dual tasking on the vigilance decrement phenomenon. We examined the executive (i.e., detecting infrequent critical signals) and arousal (i.e., sustaining a fast reaction to stimuli without much control on responses) vigilance decrements as a function of task load. Ninety-six participants performed eit...

An extensive literature has investigated the impact of musical training on cognitive skills and academic achievement in children and adolescents. However, most of the studies have relied on cross-sectional designs, which makes it impossible to elucidate whether the observed differences are a consequence of the engagement in musical activities. Prev...

From early ages, gaze acts as a cue to infer the interests, behaviours, thoughts and emotions of social partners. Despite sharing attentional properties with other non‐social directional stimuli, such as arrows, gaze produces unique effects. A spatial interference task revealed this dissociation. The direction of arrows was identified faster on con...

Emotion regulation research has exponentially grown in the past several years. However, to date, there is little information regarding its relation to cheerfulness, understood as a positive affective predisposition to sense of humor. The aim of the present study was to analyze the relationship between emotion regulation strategies and the state and...

Attention fluctuates over time. Models such as Dynamic Attending Theory propose that attention follows an oscillatory pattern that can be entrained by exogenous stimulations. Moreover, the passage of time itself when there is the certainty that the target will appear after an interval (i.e., foreperiod) can be used to support attention. As the prob...

In this study, we jointly reported in an empirical and a theoretical way, for the first time, two main theories: Lavie’s perceptual load theory and Gaspelin et al.’s attentional dwelling hypothesis. These theories explain in different ways the modulation of the perceptual load/task difficulty over attentional capture by irrelevant distractors and l...

Numerous studies have shown that directional stimuli such as gaze and arrows induce reflexive shifts of attention towards the cued locations, even when they do not predict above chance the location of target information. Nevertheless, there is still debate about the existence of quantitative differences between the cueing effects triggered by socia...

Recent research has found that eye gaze and arrows yield opposite congruency effects in a spatial interference paradigm, arrows eliciting faster responses when their direction is congruent with their position (standard congruency effect), and gaze producing faster reaction times for incongruent conditions (reversed congruency effect). In addition,...

In social contexts, aging is typically associated with a greater reliance on heuristics, such as categorical information and stereotypes. The present research examines younger and older adults’ use of individuating and age-based categorical information when gauging whether or not to trust unfamiliar targets. In an adaptation of the iterated Trust G...

Object sounds can enhance the attentional selection and perceptual processing of semantically-related visual stimuli. However, it is currently unknown whether crossmodal semantic congruence also affects the post-perceptual stages of information processing, such as short-term memory (STM), and whether this effect is modulated by the object consisten...

Recent evidence with a spatial interference paradigm has shown that arrows and eye gaze yield opposite congruency effects, arrow target eliciting faster responses when their direction is congruent with their position (standard congruency effect), and gaze producing faster reaction times for incongruent conditions (reversed congruency effect). But i...

In the present study, we analyse the influence of goal maintenance and goal change on the efficiency of executive control. Although there is empirical evidence on the impact of goal maintenance and task-switching on executive control, little is known about the consequences of changing between processing goals (e.g., speed or accuracy goals). We ass...

Attentional difficulties are a core axis in attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). However, establishing a consistent and detailed pattern of these neurocognitive alterations has not been an easy endeavour. Based on a dimensional approach to ADHD, the present study aims at comprehensively characterizing three key attentional domains: the...

We investigated whether individuals with high levels of autistic traits integrate relevant communicative signals, such as facial expression, when decoding eye-gaze direction. Students with high vs. low scores on the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) performed a task in which they responded to the eyes’ direction of faces, presented on the left or the r...

Implicit learning refers to the incidental acquisition and expression of knowledge that is not accompanied by full awareness of its contents. Implicit sequence learning (ISL) represents one of the most useful paradigms to investigate these processes. In this paradigm, participants are usually instructed to respond to the location of a target that m...

Previous literature has shown cognitive improvements related to musical training. Attention is one cognitive aspect in which musicians exhibit improvements compared to non-musicians. However, previous studies show inconsistent results regarding certain attentional processes, suggesting that benefits associated with musical training appear only in s...

In exogenous attention, two main behavioural effects are usually observed across time: facilitation at short cue-target onset asynchronies (CTOAs), and Inhibition of Return (IOR) at longer CTOAs. The presentation of an intervening event (IE)-i.e., a cue presented at fixation between the peripheral cue and target period-favours the appearance of IOR...