Signe Vangkilde

University of Copenhagen · Department of Psychology

Atypical neurocognitive functioning has been found in adult patients with obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). However, little work has been done in children and adolescents with OCD. In this study, we investigated neurocognitive functioning in a large and representative sample of newly diagnosed children and adolescents with OCD compared to non-ps...

Background: Knowledge on adverse events in psychotherapy for youth with OCD is sparse. No official guidelines exist for defining or monitoring adverse events in psychotherapy. Recent recommendations call for more qualitative and quantitative assessment of adverse events in psychotherapy trials. This mixed methods study aims to expand knowledge on...

Rationale Attention is compromised in many psychiatric disorders, including attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). While dopamine and noradrenaline systems have been implicated in ADHD, their exact role in attentional processing is yet unknown. Objectives We applied the theory of visual attention (TVA) model, adapted from human research,...

Background Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a debilitating psychiatric disorder which affects up to 3% of children and adolescents. OCD in children and adolescents is generally treated with cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), which, in more severely affected patients, can be combined with antidepressant medication. The TECTO trial aims to co...

Objectives: Emotion regulation is a predictor of overall life outcome. Problems of emotion regulation are associated with multiple psychiatric disorders and could be a potential treatment target for improving well-being and functioning. Children at familial high risk of severe mental illness have a markedly increased risk of various psychopatholog...

The Attentional Blink (AB) refers to a deficit in reporting a second target (T2) embedded in a stream of distractors when presented 200-500 ms after a preceding target (T1). Several theories about the origin of the AB have been proposed; filter-based theories claim that the AB is the result of a temporarily closing of an attentional gate to avoid f...

Objective: Methylphenidate is a first-line treatment for ADHD; its contribution to sleep problems in adult ADHD is currently unclear. This study investigates (a) subjective sleep disturbances in a group of initially stimulant medication-naïve adults with ADHD and (b) reported changes in sleep problems after 6 weeks of methylphenidate treatment. M...

Abstract Background Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is the recommended first-line treatment for children and adolescents with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), but evidence concerning treatment-specific benefits and harms compared with other interventions is limited. Furthermore, high risk-of-bias in most trials prevent firm conclusions rega...

Background Deficient information processing in ADHD theoretically results in sensory overload and may underlie the symptoms of the disorder. Mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3a amplitude reflect an individual's detection and subsequent change in attention to stimulus change in their environment. Our primary aim was to explore MMN and P3a amplitude in...

The cognitive control system matures gradually with age and shows age-related sex differences. To gain knowledge concerning error adaptation in familial high-risk groups, investigating error adaptation among the offspring of parents with severe mental disorders is important and may contribute to the understanding of cognitive functioning in at-risk...

Deficient information processing in ADHD theoretically results in sensory overload, which in turn may underlie its symptoms. If this sensory overload is caused by deficient filtering of environmental stimuli, then one would expect finding deficits in P50 gating and prepulse inhibition of the startle reflex (PPI). Previous reports on these measures...

Background Children with familial high risk of schizophrenia (FHR-SZ) or bipolar disorder (FHR-BP) are at increased risk of developing similar disorders and show cognitive deficits during childhood. The aim of this paper is to investigate visual attention and its developmental trajectories in children with FHR-SZ and with FHR-BP to increase our kno...

Background Explosive outbursts occur in 25%–70% of children with Tourette syndrome (TS) and may cause more distress than the tics themselves. Previous studies have indicated that a comorbid diagnosis of attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with emotional dysregulation in TS; however, this relationship has almost exclusively...

Supplementary Material for Decreased Cingulo-Opercular Network Functional Connectivity Mediates the Impact of Aging on Visual Processing Speed (http://doi.org/10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2018.09.014)

In a recent letter to the editor, a group of clinician-researchers posit that the conclusions in our published systematic review¹ on cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for pediatric obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) are based on inappropriate methodology. In this reply, we address the concerns expressed by Storch et al.

Background: The length of the serotonin transporter polymorphic region (5-HTTLPR) has been suggested to be associated with risk for developing depression, though with inconsistent evidence. Likewise, the personality trait Harm Avoidance (HA) has been linked to vulnerability for developing depression. However, no study has investigated whether there...

Background Gabor patterns are defined as the product of a sinusoid function and a Gaussian envelope and are commonly used in visual and attentional research due to their ability to selectively stimulate the primary visual cortex. The aim of this study was to investigate whether Gabor patterns can be used as visual stimuli in the rodent continuous p...

Background and objectives: Difficulties in emotion regulation (ER) have been associated with several psychiatric disorders, emphasizing a need for a greater understanding of the concept and its associations with disruptive behavior. We aimed to study the ER strategy of cognitive reappraisal with an experimental test to increase our knowledge of em...

The ability to regulate one’s emotions is crucial to engaging successfully in social contexts. Difficulties in emotion regulation are seen in multiple psychiatric disorders, prompting an increased interest in the concept. Suitable methods for assessing emotion regulation, however, are lacking. In this study, we investigated the interrater and intra...

Objective: To assess benefits and harms of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) versus no intervention or versus other interventions for pediatric obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Method: We searched for randomized clinical trials of CBT for pediatric OCD. Primary outcomes were OCD severity, serious adverse events, and level of functioning. Se...

Background: Attention deficits are found in children at familial high risk of schizophrenia (FHR-SZ) and bipolar disorder (FHR-BP) using assessment methods relying on motor-based response latency. This study compares visual attention functions in children at FHR-SZ or FHR-BP with controls using an unspeeded task unconfounded by motor components....

Rationale The serotonergic system has been repeatedly linked to visual attention in general, but the effects of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) on specific components of visual attention remain unknown. Changes in distinct perceptual and cognitive processes are not readily evident in most attention paradigms. Objective In this study,...

Visual attention enables us to prioritise behaviourally relevant visual information while ignoring distraction. The neural networks supporting attention are modulated by two catecholamines, dopamine and noradrenaline. The current study investigated the effects of single nucleotide polymorphisms in two catecholaminergic genes – COMT (Val158Met) and...

Background Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder which frequently persists into adulthood. The primary goal of the current study was to (a) investigate attentional functions of stimulant medication-naïve adults with ADHD, and (b) investigate the effects of 6 weeks of methylphenidate treatment on these func...

The neural factors that account for the visual processing speed reduction in aging are incompletely understood. Based on previous reports of age-related decreases in the intrinsic functional connectivity (iFC) within the cingulo-opercular network and its relevance for processing speed, we hypothesized that these decreases are associated with age-re...

Background: ADHD is a heterogeneous disorder, associated with deficits in motivation (e.g., delay aversion) and cognition. Methylphenidate is recommended as a first line treatment for ADHD symptoms, but little is known about its non-acute effects on motivational and cognitive deficits, particularly in adults with ADHD. Methods: We utilized a pro...

Background: Given the partially shared genetic liability between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, we aimed to assess whether 7-year-old children with a familial high risk of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder display specific deficits of sustained attention and interference control compared with each other and with control children. Methods: A...

Objective: Approximately, 50% of all individuals with anxiety disorders do not benefit from the "gold standard" treatment, namely cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Reliable predictors of treatment effect are lacking. The primary aim of this study was to investigate the predictive value of emotion regulation, attentional control, and attachment s...

Visual short-term memory (vSTM) is a cognitive resource that declines with age. This study investigated whether electroencephalography (EEG) correlates of vSTM vary with cognitive development over individuals' lifespan. We measured vSTM performance and EEG in a lateralized whole-report task in a healthy birth cohort, whose cognitive function (intel...

Phasic alertness refers to a short-lived change in the preparatory state of the cognitive system following an alerting signal. In the present study, we examined the effect of phasic auditory alerting on distinct perceptual processes, unconfounded by motor components. We combined an alerting/no-alerting design with a pure accuracy-based single-lette...

Background: Although there is substantial evidence for the role of emotion regulation in the etiology and maintenance of anxiety disorders, knowledge about what contributes to emotion dysregulation is sparse. Attachment style is related to emotion regulation and anxiety symptoms, but these variables have rarely been examined together. Examining em...

Objective: Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a complex developmental neuropsychiatric disorder, characterized by inattentiveness, impulsivity, and hyperactivity. Recent literature suggests a potential core deficit underlying these behaviors may involve inefficient processing when contextual stimulation is low. In order to specify...

Rationale: The 5-choice serial reaction time task (5-CSRTT) is widely used to measure rodent attentional functions. In humans, many attention studies in healthy and clinical populations have used testing based on Bundesen's Theory of Visual Attention (TVA) to estimate visual processing speeds and other parameters of attentional capacity. Objectiv...

Introduction Olfaction may be related to food restriction and weight loss. However, reports regarding olfactory function in individuals with anorexia nervosa (AN) have been inconclusive. Objective Characterize olfactory sensitivity and identification in female adolescents and young adults with first-episode AN and young females recovered from AN....

The data used for conclusions in the article can be found in the S1 Dataset. (XLS)

Stimulus eccentricity affects visual processing in multiple ways. Performance on a visual task is often better when target stimuli are presented near or at the fovea compared to the retinal periphery. For instance, reaction times and error rates are often reported to increase with increasing eccentricity. Such findings have been interpreted as pure...

Introduction: Cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) is effective for treating anxiety disorders and is offered in most mental health services around the world. However, a relatively large number of patients with anxiety disorders do not benefit from CBT, experience relapses or drop out. Reliable predictors of treatment effects are lacking. The aim o...

The Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS) measures perceived degree of inattentiveness in different contexts and is often used as a reversed indicator of mindfulness. MAAS is hypothesized to reflect a psychological trait or disposition when used outside attentional training contexts, but the long-term test-retest reliability of MAAS scores is vi...

Background: Prolonged psychological stress is a risk factor for illness and constitutes an increasing public health challenge creating a need to develop public interventions specifically targeting stress and promoting mental health. The present randomized controlled trial evaluated health effects of a novel program: Relaxation-Response-based Menta...

A bilateral change detection paradigm is often used to measure lateralized ERP-components, such as the Contralateral Delay Activity (CDA), believed to be associated with visual short-term memory (e.g. Vogel and Machizawa, 2004; Alvarez and Cavanagh, 2004; McCollough et al., 2007 ). Recently, Wiegand et al. (2014) developed a similar whole report pa...

Visuospatial attention allows us to select and act upon a subset of behaviorally relevant visual stimuli while ignoring distraction. Bundesen's theory of visual attention (TVA) (Bundesen, 1990) offers a quantitative analysis of the different facets of attention within a unitary model and provides a powerful analytic framework for understanding indi...

This study investigated attention control and attentional bias for emotional stimuli in children with anxiety disorders, compared with disorder-free children. Furthermore, it examined the effect of individual cognitive behavioral therapy on these attentional variables in anxious children. Participants included 22 anxious and 20 control children (ag...

The Neural Theory of Visual Attention of Bundesen et al. (2005) was proposed as a neural interpretation of Bundesen's (1990) theory of visual attention (TVA). In NTVA, visual attention operates via two mechanisms: by dynamic remapping of receptive fields of cortical cells such that more cells are devoted to behaviorally important objects than to le...

Attentional selection can be viewed as having two aspects: selection with respect to particular objects and selection with respect to particular categories. Both aspects are mathematically modeled in the theory of visual attention (TVA). In this paper, we expand the rate equation of the TVA and propose that the visual bias toward seeing an object x...

This article reviews the foundations of the theory of visual attention (TVA) and describes recent developments in the theory. TVA is based on the principle of biased competition: All possible visual categorizations ascribing features to objects compete (race) to become encoded into visual short-term memory before it is filled up. Each of the possib...

In this study the primary aims were to characterize the effects of age on basic components of visual attention derived from assessments based on a theory of visual attention (TVA) in 325 healthy volunteers covering the adult lifespan (19–81 years). Furthermore, we aimed to investigate how age-related differences on TVA parameters are associated wit...

By varying the probabilities that a stimulus would appear at particular times after the presentation of a cue and modeling the data by the theory of visual attention (Bundesen, 1990), Vangkilde, Coull, and Bundesen (2012) provided evidence that the speed of encoding a singly presented stimulus letter into visual short-term memory (VSTM) is modulate...

Conventional wisdom on psychological experiments has held that when one or more independent variables are manipulated it is essential that all other conditions are kept constant such that confounding factors can be assumed negligible (Woodworth, 1938). In practice, the latter assumption is often questionable because it is generally difficult to gua...

Temporal expectation is expectation with respect to the timing of an event such as the appearance of a certain stimulus. In this paper, temporal expectancy is investigated in the context of the theory of visual attention (TVA), and we begin by summarizing the foundations of this theoretical framework. Next, we present a parametric experiment explor...

Words are made of letters, and yet sometimes it is easier to identify a word than a single letter. This word superiority effect (WSE) has been observed when written stimuli are presented very briefly or degraded by visual noise. We compare performance with letters and words in three experiments, to explore the extents and limits of the WSE. Using a...

Posner's attention network model and Bundesen's theory of visual attention (TVA) are two influential accounts of attention. Each model has led to the development of a test method: the attention network test (ANT) and TVA-based assessment, respectively. Both tests have been widely used to investigate attentional function in normal and clinical popul...

The purpose of this study was to measure the effect of action video gaming on central elements of visual attention using Bundesen's (1990) Theory of Visual Attention. To examine the cognitive impact of action video gaming, we tested basic functions of visual attention in 42 young male adults. Participants were divided into three groups depending on...

Objective: Inattentive behaviour is a defining characteristic of ADHD. Researchers have wondered about the nature of the attentional deficit underlying these symptoms. The primary purpose of the current study was to examine this attentional deficit using a novel paradigm based upon the Theory of Visual Attention (TVA). Method: The TVA paradigm e...

Changes in sustained attention, attentional selectivity, and attentional capacity were examined in a sample of 113 participants between the ages of 12 and 75. To measure sustained attention, we employed the sustained-attention-to-response task (Robertson, Manly, Andrade, Baddeley, & Yiend, Neuropsychologia 35:747-58, 1997), a short continuous-perfo...

The intraparietal sulcus (IPS) has been implicated in selective attention as well as visual short-term memory (VSTM). To contrast mechanisms of target selection, distracter filtering, and access to VSTM, we combined behavioral testing, computational modeling and functional magnetic resonance imaging. Sixteen healthy subjects participated in a chang...

The Theory of Visual Attention (TVA; Bundesen, 1990) provides a quantitative account of visual attentional selectivity and capacity but does not include a parameter relating to sustained attention. We conducted two studies to examine the relationship between sustained attention and the TVA parameters relating to selectivity and capacity. In the fir...

In a crowded dynamic world, temporal expectations guide our attention in time. Prior investigations have consistently demonstrated that temporal expectations speed motor behavior. We explore effects of temporal expectation on perceptual speed in three nonspeeded, cued recognition paradigms. Different hazard rate functions for the cue-stimulus forep...

Improvements in attentional performance are at the core of proposed mechanisms for stress reduction in mindfulness meditation practices. However, this claim can be questioned because no previous studies have actively manipulated test effort in control groups and controlled for effects of stress reduction per se. In a blinded design, 48 young, healt...

In this paper we take a step towards single-trial behavioral modeling within a Theory of Visual Attention (TVA). In selective attention tasks, such as the Partial Report paradigm, the subject is asked to ignore distractors and only report stimuli that belong to the target class. Nothing about a distractor is observed directly in the subject's overt...

Nicotine has been shown to improve both memory and attention when assessed through speeded motor responses. Since very few studies have assessed effects of nicotine on visual attention using measures that are uncontaminated by motoric effects, nicotine's attentional effects may, at least partially, be due to speeding of motor function. Using an uns...

Temporal expectations play an important role in optimizing future perception and behavior, but the nature of the attentional processes affected by our expectations is still widely debated. To investigate effects of expectations on the speed of visual processing, we employed a cued single-letter recognition task with stimuli of varied durations term...

Several studies have found that visuo-motor adaptation to rightward deviating prismatic goggles (prism adaptation) can alleviate symptoms of neglect after brain damage, but the long-term effect and clinical relevance of this rehabilitation approach have been questioned. In particular, the effect on visual search performance is controversial. In the...

To examine the neural correlates and timing of human visual awareness, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) in two experiments while the observers were detecting a grey dot that was presented near subjective threshold. ERPs were averaged for conscious detections of the stimulus (hits) and nondetections (misses) separately. Our results reveal...

To study whether the distinction between introspective and non-introspective states of mind is an empirical reality or merely a conceptual distinction, we measured event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited in introspective and non-introspective instruction conditions while the observers were trying to detect the presence of a masked stimulus. The ER...

The postoperative retemtion of a preoperatively acquired action sequence task administered in a "Krechevsky maze" was studied in rats subjected to either bilateral ablations of the anteromedial prefrontal cortex or a "sham" control operation. The postoperative retention of this task was transiently impaired (when comparing to the preoperative perfo...