Steven J Luck

University of California, Davis | UCD · UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain

Although it is widely accepted that data quality for event-related potential (ERP) components varies considerably across studies and across participants within a study, ERP data quality has not received much systematic analysis. The present study used a recently developed metric of ERP data quality— the standardized measurement error (SME)—to exami...

We tested 6- and 8-month-old White and Non-White infants (N = 53 total, 28 girls) from Northern California, USA, in a visual search task to determine whether a unique item in an otherwise homogeneous display (a singleton) attracts attention because it is a unique singleton and “pops out” in a categorical manner, or whether attention instead varies...

We tested 6- and 8-month-old White and non-White infants (N = 53 total, 28 girls) from Northern California in a visual search task to determine whether a unique item in an otherwise homogeneous display (a singleton) attracts attention because it is a unique singleton and "pops out" in a categorical manner, or whether attention instead varies in a g...

A growing body of literature suggests that cognitive impairment in people with schizophrenia (PSZ) results from disrupted cortical excitatory/inhibitory (E-I) balance, which may be linked to gamma entrainment and can be measured noninvasively using electroencephalography (EEG). However, it is not yet known the degree to which these entrainment abno...

The development of treatments for impaired cognition in schizophrenia has been characterized as the most important challenge facing psychiatry at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The Cognitive Neuroscience Treatment Research to Improve Cognition in Schizophrenia (CNTRICS) project was designed to build on the potential benefits of using ta...

Working memory (WM) refers to the ability to maintain a small number of representations in an activated, easily accessible state for a short period of time in the service of ongoing cognitive processing and behavior. Because WM is a resource critical for multiple forms of complex cognition and executive control of behavior, it is of central interes...

Attention is clearly a core area of cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia, but the concept of “attention” is complex and multifaceted. This chapter focuses on three different aspects of attentional function that are of particular interest in schizophrenia. First, we discuss the evidence that schizophrenia involves a reduction in global alertness,...

Distractor suppression refers to the ability to filter out distracting and task-irrelevant information. Distractor suppression is essential for survival and considered a key aspect of selective attention. Despite the recent and rapidly evolving literature on distractor suppression, we still know little about how the brain suppresses distracting inf...

Computational models of motion perception suggest that the perceived direction of weak motion signals may sometimes be directly opposite to the true stimulus motion direction. However, this possibility cannot be assessed by using standard 2AFC motion discrimination paradigms because two opposite directions of motion were used in most studies (e.g.,...

Good Scientific Practice (GSP) refers to both explicit and implicit rules, recommendations, and guidelines that help scientists to produce work that is of the highest quality at any given time, and to efficiently share that work with the community for further scrutiny or utilization. For experimental research using magneto- and electroencephalograp...

Working memory is thought to serve as a buffer for ongoing cognitive operations, even in tasks that have no obvious memory requirements. This conceptualization has been supported by dual-task experiments, in which interference is observed between a primary task involving short-term memory storage and a secondary task that presumably requires the sa...

Importance Recent accounts suggest that delusions and hallucinations may result from alterations in how prior knowledge is integrated with new information, but experimental evidence supporting this idea has been complex and inconsistent. Evidence from a simpler perceptual task would make clear whether psychotic symptoms are associated with overreli...

Natural language processing models based on machine learning (ML-NLP models) have been developed to solve practical problems, such as interpreting an Internet search query. These models are not intended to reflect human language comprehension mechanisms, and the word representations used by ML-NLP models and human brains might therefore be quite di...

Distractor suppression refers to the ability to filter out distracting and task-irrelevant information. Distractor suppression is essential for survival and considered a key aspect of selective attention. Despite the recent and rapidly evolving literature on distractor suppression, we still know little about how distracting information is suppresse...

Physically salient objects are thought to attract attention in natural scenes. However, research has shown that meaning maps, which capture the spatial distribution of semantically informative scene features, trump physical saliency in predicting the pattern of eye moments in natural scene viewing. Meaning maps even predict the fastest eye movement...

Background Youth with chromosome 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q) face one of the highest genetic risk factors for the development of schizophrenia. Previous research suggests impairments in attentional control and potential interactions with elevated anxiety and reduced adaptive functioning may increase the risk for developing psychosis in this pop...

Although people with schizophrenia (PSZ) exhibit robust and reliable deficits in working memory (WM) capacity, the neural processes that give rise to this impairment remain poorly understood. One reason for this lack of clarity is that most studies employ a single neural recording modality—each with strengths and weaknesses—with few examples of int...

Good Scientific Practice (GSP) refers to both explicit and implicit rules or guidelines that help scientists to produce work that is of the highest quality at any given time, and to efficiently share that work with the community for further scrutiny or utilization. For experimental research using magneto- and electroencephalography (MEEG), GSP inc...

Luck et al. (2021 Luck, S. J., Gaspelin, N., Folk, C. L., Remington, R. W., & Theeuwes, J. (2021). Progress toward resolving the attentional capture debate. Visual Cognition, 29(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/13506285.2020.1848949[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) reviewed evidence that observers can learn to suppr...

Although schizophrenia is classically thought to involve impaired attentional filtering, people with schizophrenia (PSZ) exhibit a more intense and more exclusive attentional focus than healthy control subjects (HCS) in many tasks. To resolve this contradiction, this functional magnetic resonance imaging study tested the impact of attentional contr...

Schizophrenia is widely thought to involve elevated distractibility, which may reflect a general impairment in top-down inhibitory processes. Schizophrenia also appears to involve increased priming of previously performed actions. Here, we used a highly refined eye-tracking paradigm that makes it possible to concurrently assess distractibility, inh...

Little is known about the development of higher-level areas of visual cortex during infancy, and even less is known about how the development of visually guided behavior is related to the different levels of the cortical processing hierarchy. As a first step toward filling these gaps, we used representational similarity analysis (RSA) to assess lin...

Working memory is thought to serve as a buffer for ongoing cognitive operations, even in tasks that have no obvious memory requirements. This conceptualization has been supported by dual-task experiments, in which interference is observed between a primary task involving short-term memory storage and a secondary task that presumably requires the sa...

Event‐related potentials (ERPs) can be very noisy, and yet, there is no widely accepted metric of ERP data quality. Here, we propose a universal measure of data quality for ERP research—the standardized measurement error (SME)—which is a special case of the standard error of measurement. Whereas some existing metrics provide a generic quantificatio...

For over 25 years, researchers have debated whether physically salient stimuli capture attention in an automatic manner, independent of the observer’s goals, or whether the capture of attention depends on the match between a stimulus and the observer’s task set. Recent evidence suggests an intermediate position in which salient stimuli automaticall...

Computational neuroscience models propose that working memory (WM) involves recurrent excitatory feedback loops that maintain firing over time along with lateral inhibition that prevents the spreading of activity to other feature values. In behavioral paradigms, this lateral inhibition appears to cause a repulsion of WM representations away from ea...

Event-related potentials (ERPs) are noninvasive measures of human brain activity that index a range of sensory, cognitive, affective, and motor processes. Despite their broad application across basic and clinical research, there is little standardization of ERP paradigms and analysis protocols across studies. To address this, we created ERP CORE (C...

Background Schizophrenia is a disorder characterized by pervasive deficits in cognitive functioning. However, few well-powered studies have examined the degree to which cognitive performance is impaired even among individuals with schizophrenia not currently on antipsychotic medications using a wide range of cognitive and reinforcement learning mea...

The antisaccade task is considered a test of cognitive control because it creates a conflict between the strong bottom-up signal produced by the cue and the top-down goal of shifting gaze to the opposite side of the display. Antisaccade deficits in schizophrenia are thought to reflect impaired top-down inhibition of the prepotent bottom-up response...

Electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings provide a valuable, noninvasive method for measuring human brain activity. This protocol modifies our general protocol for EEG recording (Farrens et al., 2019) for use during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was created with the help of numerous experts, and it specifies a clear set of steps for interacting with resea...

Electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings provide a valuable, noninvasive method for measuring human brain activity. This protocol modifies our general protocol for EEG recording (Farrens et al., 2019) for use during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was created with the help of numerous experts, and it specifies a clear set of steps for interacting with resea...

Event-related potentials (ERPs) are noninvasive measures of human brain activity that index a range of sensory, cognitive, affective, and motor processes. Despite their broad application across basic and clinical research, there is little standardization of ERP paradigms and analysis protocols across studies. To address this, we created ERP CORE (C...

Background Impairments in spatial working memory (sWM) have been well-documented in schizophrenia. Here we provide a comprehensive test of a microcircuit model of WM performance in schizophrenia, which predicts enhanced effects of increasing delay duration and distractors based on a hypothesized imbalance of excitatory and inhibitory processes. Me...

Behavioral components of chromosome 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q), caused by the most common human microdeletion, include cognitive and adaptive functioning impairments, heightened anxiety, and an elevated risk of schizophrenia. We investigated how interactions between executive function and the largely overlooked factor of emotion regulation mig...

Everyday functioning requires the appropriate allocation of visual attention, which is achieved through multiple mechanisms of attentional guidance. Traditional theories have focused on top-down and bottom-up factors, but implicit learning from recent experience ("selection history") also has a substantial impact on attentional allocation. The pres...

A frequent finding when studying substrates of working memory (WM) deficits in people with schizophrenia (PSZ) is task-induced hyperactivation relative to healthy control subjects (HCS) when WM load is low. Hyperactivation accompanying similar performance is commonly attributed to cognitive deficits rendering relatively easy operations more resourc...

We investigated limitations in young infants’ visual short‐term memory (VSTM). We used a one‐shot change detection task to ask whether 4‐ and 8.5‐month‐old infants (N = 59) automatically encode fixated items in VSTM. Our task included trials that consisted of the following sequence: first a brief (500 ms) presentation with a sample array of two ite...

The N2pc ERP component has been widely used as a measure of lateralized visual attention. It is characterized by a negativity contralateral to the attended location or target, and it is thought to reflect contralaterally enhanced processing of attended information in intermediate to high levels of the ventral visual pathway. Given that the receptiv...

Multivariate pattern classification (decoding) methods are commonly employed to study mechanisms of neurocognitive processing in typical individuals, where they can be used to quantify the information that is present in single-participant neural signals. These decoding methods are also potentially valuable in determining how the representation of i...

The reported perception of a visual stimulus on one trial can be biased by the stimulus that was presented on the previous trial. In the present study we asked whether encoding the previous-trial stimulus is sufficient to produce this serial dependence effect, or whether the effect also depends on postencoding processes. To distinguish between thes...

Electroencephalography (EEG) is one of the most widely used techniques to measure human brain activity. EEG recordings provide a direct, high temporal resolution measure of cortical activity from noninvasive scalp electrodes. However, the signals are small relative to the noise, and optimizing the quality of the recorded EEG data can significantly...

Electroencephalography (EEG) is one of the most widely used techniques to measure human brain activity. EEG recordings provide a direct, high temporal resolution measure of cortical activity from noninvasive scalp electrodes. However, the signals are small relative to the noise, and optimizing the quality of the recorded EEG data can significantly...

Electroencephalography (EEG) is one of the most widely used techniques to measure human brain activity. EEG recordings provide a direct, high temporal resolution measure of cortical activity from noninvasive scalp electrodes. However, the signals are small relative to the noise, and optimizing the quality of the recorded EEG data can significantly...

Electroencephalography (EEG) is one of the most widely used techniques to measure human brain activity. EEG recordings provide a direct, high temporal resolution measure of cortical activity from noninvasive scalp electrodes. However, the signals are small relative to the noise, and optimizing the quality of the recorded EEG data can significantly...

Impairments in basic cognitive processes such as attention and working memory are commonly observed in people with schizophrenia and are predictive of long-term outcome. In this review, we describe a new theory-the hyperfocusing hypothesis-which provides a unified account of many aspects of impaired cognition in schizophrenia. This hypothesis propo...

Recent evidence suggests that schizophrenia involves hyperfocusing, an unusually narrow but intense focusing of processing resources. This appears to contradict the classic idea that schizophrenia involves an impairment in the ability to focus on relevant information and filter irrelevant information. Here, we review one set of studies suggesting t...

Bae & Luck (2018) reported a study of visual working memory in which the orientation being held in memory was decoded from the scalp distribution of sustained ERP activity and alpha-band EEG oscillations. Decoding accuracy was compared to chance at each point during the delay interval, and a correction for multiple comparisons was applied to find c...

Successful execution of many behavioral goals relies on well-organized patterns of saccadic eye movements, and in complex tasks, these patterns can reveal the component processes underlying task performance. The present study examined the pattern of eye movements in a visual search task to provide evidence of attentional control impairments in peop...

Background Working memory (WM) deficits are seen as a core deficit in schizophrenia, implicated in the broad cognitive impairment seen in the illness. Here we examine the impact of WM storage of a single item on the operation of other cognitive systems. Methods We studied 37 healthy controls (HCS) and 43 people with schizophrenia (PSZ). Each trial...

Background An emerging model posits that perceptual inference deficits could lead to distorted internal models of the world, which could then explain the existence of abnormal beliefs or delusions experienced by people with schizophrenia(PSZ). Here, we used motion perception tasks to explore how construction of internal models of the environment ar...

Background Working memory (WM) deficits are considered to be a core deficit in schizophrenia, implicated in the broad cognitive impairment seen in the illness. To date, the evidence supporting this view is based on correlations between measures of WM capacity or precision with other cognitive measures. Here we take an experimental approach and dire...

Several studies have demonstrated that salient distractors can be proactively inhibited to prevent attentional capture. Traditional theories frame attentional guidance effects such as this in terms of explicit goals. However, several researchers have recently argued that that unconscious factors – such as the features of attended and ignored items...

Recent experiences influence the processing of new information even when those experiences are irrelevant to the current task. Does this reflect the indirect effects of a passively maintained representation of the previous experience, or is this representation reactivated when a new event occurs? To answer this question, we attempted to decode the...

Infants' ability to perform visual short-term memory (VSTM) tasks develops rapidly between 6 and 8 months. Here we tested the hypothesis that infants' VSTM performance is influenced by their ability to individuate simultaneously presented objects. We used a one-shot change detection task to ask whether 6-month-old infants (N = 47) would detect a ch...

Alpha-band (8-12 Hz) EEG activity has been linked to visual attention since the earliest EEG studies. More recent studies using spatial cuing paradigms have shown that alpha is suppressed over the hemisphere contralateral to a to-be-attended location, suggesting that alpha serves as a mechanism of preparatory attention. Here, we demonstrate that al...

Researchers have long debated whether salient stimuli can involuntarily 'capture' visual attention. We review here evidence for a recently discovered inhibitory mechanism that may help to resolve this debate. This evidence suggests that salient stimuli naturally attempt to capture attention, but capture can be avoided if the salient stimulus is sup...

Background: Working memory (WM) has been a central focus of cognitive neuroscience research because WM is a resource that is involved in many different cognitive operations. The goal of this study was to evaluate the clinical utility of WM paradigms developed in the basic cognitive neuroscience literature, including methods designed to estimate st...

PFC dysfunction is widely believed to underlie working memory (WM) deficits in people with schizophrenia (PSZ), but few studies have focused on measures of WM storage devoid of manipulation. Research in neurotypical individuals has shown that storage capacity is more closely related to posterior parietal cortex (PPC) than PFC, suggesting that reduc...

The change detection task is a common method for assessing the storage capacity of working memory, but estimates of memory capacity from this task can be distorted by lapses of attention. When combined with appropriate mathematical models, some versions of the change detection task make it possible to separately estimate working memory and the prob...

This study tested the hypothesis that even the simplest cognitive tasks require the storage of information in working memory (WM), distorting any information that was previously stored in WM. Experiment 1 tested this hypothesis by requiring observers to perform a simple letter discrimination task while they were holding a single orientation in WM....

Feature-based attentional selection is accomplished by increasing the gain of sensory neurons encoding target-relevant features while decreasing that of other features. But how do these mechanisms work when targets and distractors share features? We investigated this in a simplified color-shape conjunction search task using ERP components (N2pc, PD...

Traditionally, attention was thought to be directed by either top-down goals or bottom-up salience. Recent studies have shown that the reward history of a stimulus feature also acts as a powerful attentional cue. This is particularly relevant in schizophrenia, which is characterized by motivational and attentional deficits. Here, we examine the imp...

Traditionally, attention was thought to be directed by either top-down goals or bottom-up salience. Recent studies have shown that the reward history of a stimulus feature also acts as a powerful attentional cue. This is particularly relevant in schizophrenia, which is characterized by motivational and attentional deficits. Here, we examine the imp...

Attention researchers have long debated the roles of top-down and bottom-up mechanisms in controlling attention. Theeuwes (2018) has argued that that top-down control is much less common than typically assumed and that a third mechanism-selection history-plays an underappreciated role in guiding visual attention. Although Theeuwes has made a strong...

Researchers have long debated how salient-but-irrelevant features guide visual attention. Pure stimulus-driven theories claim that salient stimuli automatically capture attention irrespective of goals, whereas pure goal-driven theories propose that an individual's attentional control settings determine whether salient stimuli capture attention. How...

[MANUSCRIPT IN PRESS AT JOURNAL OF COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE] Researchers have long debated how salient-but-irrelevant features guide visual attention. Pure stimulus-driven theories claim that salient stimuli automatically capture attention irrespective of goals, whereas pure goal-driven theories propose that an individual's attentional control setti...

Adults' visual attention is guided by the contents of visual short-term memory (VSTM). Here we asked whether 10-month-old infants' (N = 41) visual attention is also guided by the information stored in VSTM. In two experiments, we modified the one-shot change detection task (Oakes, Baumgartner, Barrett, Messenger, & Luck, 2013) to create a simplifie...

Previous research has revealed that people can suppress salient stimuli that might otherwise capture visual attention. The present study tests between three possible mechanisms of visual suppression. According to first-order feature suppression models, items are suppressed on the basis of simple feature values. According to second-order feature sup...

Researchers have long debated how salient-but-irrelevant features guide visual attention. Pure stimulus-driven theories claim that salient stimuli automatically capture attention irrespective of goals, whereas pure goal-driven theories propose that an individual's attentional control settings determine whether salient stimuli capture attention. How...

In designing an ERP study, researchers must choose how many trials to include, balancing the desire to maximize statistical power and the need to minimize the length of the recording session. Recent studies have attempted to quantify the minimum number of trials needed to obtain reliable measures for a variety of ERP components. However, these stud...

In human scalp EEG recordings, both sustained potentials and alpha-band oscillations are present during the delay period of working memory tasks and may therefore reflect the representation of information in working memory. However, these signals may instead reflect support mechanisms rather than the actual contents of memory. In particular, alpha-...

People with schizophrenia demonstrate impairments in selective attention, working memory, and executive function. Given the overlap in these constructs, it is unclear if these represent distinct impairments or different manifestations of one higher-order impairment. To examine this question, we administered tasks from the basic cognitive neuroscien...