Juan Lupiáñez

University of Granada | UGR · Department of Experimental Psychology and Physiology of Behaviour

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...

Research has shown that bilingualism is associated with more efficient executive control (EC). However, little is known about the impact of bilingualism on social cognition, including the expression of stereotypes. Previous studies have shown that more efficient EC promotes the control of stereotypes, and this relation is influenced by participants...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Several studies have shown enhanced performance in change detection tasks when spatial cues indicating the probe’s location are presented after the memory array has disappeared (i.e., retro-cues) compared with spatial cues that are presented simultaneously with the test array (i.e., post-cues). This retro-cue benefit led some authors to propose the...

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). But social st...

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 simu...

Nowadays, there is considerable controversy regarding the structural connectivity underlying the attentional networks system (i.e., alerting and vigilance, orienting, and executive control). The present study aimed at further examining and dissociating the white matter connectivity underlying attentional and vigilance functioning by overcoming some...

Non-social directional stimuli (e.g., arrows) and gaze are equally effective as orienting signals in cueing paradigms. However, recent research from our laboratory has shown that eye gaze and arrows yield opposite congruency effects in a spatial Stroop paradigm, arrows eliciting faster responses when their direction is congruent with their position...

There is evidence that already in Greco-Roman times, fish with electrical properties were placed on people’s heads to relieve certain ailments, such as migraine or mood disorders. Since then, the use of electrical current as a treatment for pathological conditions or deficiencies has been progressively refined towards the development of a safe, eff...

The vigilance decrement phenomenon has been traditionally studied by simple and monotonous behavioral tasks. Nowadays, however, there is considerable interest in measuring vigilance with more complex tasks, including independent measures of other attentional functions. In the present study, we provide evidence supporting the suitability of the Atte...

As an automatic process, implicit learning effects have been characterized as inflexible and largely tied to the reinstatement of the acquisition context. However, implicit learning transfer has been observed under certain conditions, depending on the changes introduced between training and transfer. Here, we assess the hypothesis that transfer is...

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 endeavor. The present study aimed at thoroughly characterizing three key attentional domains, namely, the three attentional networks (alerting,...

Existe evidencia de que en tiempos tan remotos como la antigüedad greco-romana se colocaban peces con propiedades eléctricas sobre la cabeza de personas con el fin de aliviar ciertas dolencias, como la migraña o alteraciones del estado anímico. Desde entonces el empleo de la corriente eléctrica para tratar estados patológicos o deficiencias se ha r...

Previous studies have reported increased interference when a task-irrelevant acoustic warning signal preceded the target presentation in cognitive tasks. However, the alerting-congruence interaction was mostly observed for tasks measuring Flanker and Simon interferences but not for Stroop conflict. These findings led to the assumption that warning...

Over the past few years, there has been growing interest in using online methods for collecting data from large samples.However, only a few studies have administered online behavioral tasks to assess attention outside the lab. In the present study, we assessed the classic attentional functions and two vigilance components using two versions of the...

Does mindfulness meditation improve our capacity to manage attention and behavior in a flexible manner toward the achievement of relevant goals? Here, we describe the first meta-analysis assessing the efficacy of mindfulness mediation training as an enhancer for executive control. The study synthesizes 13 randomized controlled trials conducted in a...

¿Mejora la meditación mindfulness la capacidad de dirigir nuestra atención y acciones de forma flexible y eficaz hacia metas relevantes? Describimos a continuación el primer metaanálisis que examina la eficacia del entrenamiento en meditación mindfulness en la mejora del control ejecutivo. El estudio sintetiza un total de 13 ensayos controlados ale...

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,...

Recent research suggests that trait cheerfulness triggers larger state cheerfulness variations after facing amusing and sad clips. The present study aimed at replicating and extending these effects. A sample of 80 psychology students (68 women) was selected depending on their scores in trait cheerfulness. Participants watched a set of positive and...

The attentional spatial-numerical association of response codes (Att-SNARC) effect (Fischer, Castel, Dodd, & Pratt, 2003)—the finding that participants are quicker to detect left-side targets when the targets are preceded by small numbers and quicker to detect right-side targets when they are preceded by large numbers—has been used as evidence for...

Previous research has demonstrated that fully irrelevant distractors – i.e., not sharing any feature with the target – capture our attention and modulate our responses. In the present study, we explored this interference by irrelevant distractors in a series of three experiments wherein the emotional valence of distractors (negative vs. neutral val...

Our environment is full of rhythms, which have an important predictive value as cues for the preparation and temporal orienting of attention. At the neurocognitive level, rhythms promote attentional entrainment, concentrating higher levels of attention at the moments in which the appearance of a critical event is more likely. This strategic use of...

During physical efforts and sport practice, vigilance is responsible for maintaining an optimal state of activation, guaranteeing the ability to quickly respond and detect unexpected, but critical, stimuli over time. Caffeine and physical exercise are able to modulate the activation state, affecting vigilance performance. The aim of the present wor...

Perceptual grouping leads to interference when target and distractors are integrated within the same percept. Cognitive control allows breaking this automatic tendency by focusing selectively on target information. Thus, interference can be modulated either by goal-directed mechanisms or by physical features of stimuli that help to segregate the ta...

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

The main purpose of this study was to explore the association between the regular practice of open skill sports (i.e., soccer) and executive control, along with other attentional functions (i.e., alerting and orienting) during preadolescence. The study was conducted on 131 participants (70 non-athletes and 61 soccer players). To measure cognitive p...

Attention comprises a wide set of processes such as phasic alertness, orienting, executive control, and the executive (i.e., detecting infrequent targets) and arousal (i.e., sustaining a fast reaction) vigilance components. Importantly, the effects of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over attentional functioning have been mostly addre...

Although most studies on social attention have shown undistinguishable attentional effects in response to eye-gaze and arrow cues, recent research has found that whereas the orienting of attention triggered by eye-gaze is directed to the specific position, or part of the object looked at, arrows unselectively elicit attention toward parts of the en...

Objectives Over the last years, mindfulness meditation has been claimed to be effective in enhancing several cognitive domains, including executive control. However, these claims have been mostly based on findings pertaining to case-control and cross-sectional studies, which are by nature unable to reveal causal relationships. Aiming to address thi...

The present study tests whether two different manipulations leading to an earlier appearance of Inhibition of Return might operate by setting the system in different ways. Whereas the use of a range of very long SOAs has been proposed to set the system for an early reorienting of attention (Cheal & Chastain, 2002), introducing a distractor at the l...

Objectives: Over the last years, mindfulness meditation has been claimed to be effective in enhancing several cognitive domains, including executive control. However, these claims have been mostly based on findings pertaining to case-control and cross-sectional studies, which are by nature unable to reveal causal relationships. Aiming to address th...

Previous literature has shown cognitive improvements related to musical training. Attention is one of the functions 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...