We all have the feeling that Attention is very important in everyday life, which connects with the famous quote by William James that “Everyone knows what attention is”. And, indeed, since the original cognitive models by Broadbent, Treisman, and others, Attention has been considered a central mechanism to cognition, necessary for the selection of information, either at early perceptual stages, like in Broadbent’s model, or in late response-related stages, as in Norman and Shallice’s model, with the important role given to the supervisory attentional system. Other important theories like Khaneman's resources model emphasized an energetic view of attention with the quantity of mental energy (cognitive resources) available at any specific point in time becoming crucial in the explanation of attentional performance. This variety of processes assigned to the concept of attention has led some authors like Bernhard Hommel to believe that in fact “no one knows what attention is” , thus concluding that the term attention should not be considered as an explanatory concept in cognition, given that it does not refer to a specific enough functional/neural system.
Fortunately, however, not everyone thinks this way. One of the most renowned alternatives to this pessimistic view of Attention is the integrative model by Michel I. Posner, according to which attention should be considered as a system exerting three different attentional functions (orienting -or selection in perception-, cognitive control -or selection at response levels-, and alertness -or selection in time-) with an important overall role in the coordination of behaviour. These attentional functions are implemented in three neural networks, anatomically separated from the attentionally modulated processing systems: a noradrenergic network of frontal and parietal regions of the right hemisphere, for alertness, a norepinephrinergic fronto-parietal network (FEF, parietal cortex, and other subcortical structures) for orienting, and two dopaminergic frontal circuits (fronto-parietal, and cingulo-opercular systems) for cognitive control. Specific tasks have been used to measure these three attentional functions following the original Attention Networks Test (ANT) developed by Posner’s group. Importantly, our group has greatly contributed to this enterprise by developing subsequent internationally widely used tasks. First, a version was developed, the ANTI, which allowed to measure not only the functioning of the three attentional networks but also the interactions among them. Later on, with the intention to add a measure of maintenance of attention along time on task, a new version was developed: the ANTI-V. Other versions of these tasks have been subsequently developed to add new components or adapt the tasks to specific populations, like children (e.g., the Child-ANTI, or the ANTI-Birds). These and other task versions, together with other tasks developed with the same logic of providing different measures of overall attentional performance, like the AttentionTrip, have been reviewed in a recent paper by professor Raymond Klein’s group in Canada. They also host an interesting database in which most data collected using these tasks can be extracted.
Nevertheless, despite providing reliable indexes of overall attentional performance, and specific attentional functions, all tasks fail to measure the difficulty in sustaining attention in time, which usually leads to a decrement in performance across time- on- task, the so-called Vigilance decrement. This is true despite the critical role of this aspect, as an explanatory factor for the variations and poor functioning of Attention in different populations (ADHD, Children vs. Elderly, Brain damaged patients, etc.), environmental conditions (noise, stressful, city vs. nature environment, etc), situations (e.g., sleep deprivation), states (e.g., fatigued, relaxed, mindful, excited), etc. Understanding whether and how attention fluctuates between and within individuals is critical for explaining Attention. Nevertheless, only with the development of the previous tasks across several research projects we were able to develop a task suitable to measure the functioning of the three attentional networks while simultaneously measuring the vigilance decrement across time on task: the ANTI-Vea or Attention Network Test for the Interactions and Executive and Arousal Vigilance.
Importantly, despite the recent interest in incorporating measures of Vigilance into the ANT tasks (e.g., the ANTI-V), the old tradition in applied psychology with the development of single tasks to specifically measure Vigilance and the vigilance decrement ( Mackworth Clock Test , CPT , SART , PVT ), and their applicability in different work settings, the theoretical understanding of Vigilance is largely underdeveloped. Therefore, apart from providing measures of vigilance decrement, one important goal of the research with the ANTI-Vea is to fill this gap by contributing to further elaborate a theoretical framework of Vigilance differentiating between two components: Executive Vigilance (EV; the controlled detection of infrequent signals among non-signal stimuli or noise) and Arousal Vigilance (AV; the sustenance of fast reactions to environmental stimuli without much control). Thus, the ANTI-Vea provides measures of the functioning of the three attentional networks (alertness, orienting and, cognitive control), together with measures of Executive and Arousal Vigilance (overall and decrements across time on task). Furthermore, the last development of the task allows monitoring of the time the mind is on-task versus mind-wandering across time on task (as self-reported by participants).
The ANTI-Vea platform is a research resource offered freely to researchers interested in investigating attention. It provides the possibility to either freely collect data on-line with different task versions (and download the data to use it for research or clinical purposes) or freely download the scripts of these attentional tasks in different programming languages to use them in data collection in the laboratory. Thus, it is possible to run the complete ANT-Vea task with the ANTI, EV, and AV trials, or to run the tasks with all stimuli, but with participants only having to respond to some trials (ANTI, SART and PVT, as single tasks, and SART-PVT as a dual task). Additionally, the same versions are provided but in which only the corresponding trials are presented (ANTI-Only, PVT-Only, SART-Only-Go, SART-Only-GoNo). Furthermore, it is possible to run an ANTI-Vea version with 8 additional trials in which a salient image of a cartoon character is added to measure distraction (ANTI-Vea-D). Finally, the tasks can be run with the standard parameters (with progressive practice before the 6 blocks of experimental trials, level 2 of difficulty and noise, 200 ms of stimuli presentation, and no Thought Probes of mind-wandering), or with some variations of these parameters (e.g., without practice, with more or fewer blocks of trials, more or less difficulty and stimuli duration, and with either 4, 8 or 12 Thought Probes).
Importantly, the tasks can be run in different languages: Spanish, English, German, French, Italian, and Polish.