Tag Heuer Makes Nightvision vision glasses... pretty cool!

Visual attention and saccades are typically studied in artificial situations, with stimuli presented to the steadily fixating eye, or saccades made along specified paths. By contrast, in real-world tasks saccadic patterns are constrained only by the demands of the motivating task. We studied attention during pauses between saccades made to perform three free-viewing tasks: counting dots, pointing to the same dots with a visible cursor, or simply looking at the dots using a freely-chosen path. Attention was assessed by the ability to identify the orientation of a briefly-presented Gabor probe. All primary tasks produced losses in identification performance, with counting producing the largest losses, followed by pointing and then looking-only. Looking-only resulted in a 37% increase in contrast thresholds in the orientation task. Counting produced more severe losses that were not overcome by increasing Gabor contrast. Detection or localization of the Gabor, unlike identification, were largely unaffected by any of the primary tasks. Taken together, these results show that attention is required to control saccades, even with freely-chosen paths, but the attentional demands of saccades are less than those attached to tasks such as counting, which have a significant cognitive load. Counting proved to be a highly demanding task that either exhausted momentary processing capacity (e.g., working memory or executive functions), or, alternatively, encouraged a strategy of filtering out all signals irrelevant to counting itself. The fact that the attentional demands of saccades (as well as those of detection/localization) are relatively modest makes it possible to continually adjust both the spatial and temporal pattern of saccades so as to re-allocate attentional resources as needed to handle the complex and multifaceted demands of real-world environments.

Exogenous orienting of attention typically produces an early facilitatory effect and a later inhibitory effect, i.e., inhibition of return (IOR). IOR occurs not only in spatial but also in non-spatial domains. Although neural mechanisms associated with spatial IOR have been well established, neural correlates underlying non-spatial IOR remain to be elucidated. In this fMRI study, we compared neural correlates of spatial and non-spatial IOR by adopting a 2 (cue type: location vs. color)x2 (stimulus onset asynchrony, SOA: long vs. short)x2 (cue validity: cued vs. uncued) factorial design. Behaviorally, spatial cueing induced the typical biphasic (i.e., the early facilitatory and later inhibitory) effects, while color cueing induced inhibitory effects at both short and long SOAs. Neurally, we found both shared and specific neural correlates of spatial and non-spatial IOR. As compared with short SOA (cued and uncued trials combined), spatial and color cueing at long SOA conjointly activated bilateral precentral gyrus and bilateral lateral occipital cortex, while spatial cueing, but not color cueing, specifically activated bilateral superior parietal cortex. Moreover, left middle frontal gyrus and left inferior frontal gyrus showed significantly higher neural activity in cued trials than in uncued trials during color-based IOR, but not during location-based IOR, implying that episodic retrieval process in the prefrontal cortex may be involved to inhibit old object representations during non-spatial IOR [Grison, S., Paul, M. A., Kessler, K., & Tipper, S. P. (2005). Inhibition of object identity in inhibition of return: Implications for encoding and retrieving inhibitory processes. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 12, 553-558; Tipper, S. P., Grison, S., & Kessler, K. (2003). Long-term inhibition of return of attention. Psychological Science, 14, 19-25]. Theoretical implications of the shared and differential neural activity associated with spatial and non-spatial IOR are discussed.

You just have to already know this is coming from Japan. A group of researchers at the Osaka Bioscience Institute has discovered a protein that is vital to transmitting information to the brain.