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Updated: Mar 10, 2026

Measurement of Neurophysiological Signals of Ignoring and Attending Processes in Attention Control

Measurement of Neurophysiological Signals of Ignoring and Attending Processes in Attention Control

Published on: July 5, 2015

Lateralized electrical brain activity reveals covert attention allocation during speaking.

Joost Rommers¹, Antje S Meyer², Peter Praamstra³

¹Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Department of Neurology, Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

Neuropsychologia

|December 13, 2016

Summary

Researchers used electroencephalography (EEG) to track covert attention during speech planning. The N2pc component revealed how attention shifts to objects before speaking, influenced by processing difficulty.

Keywords:

Covert attention EEG Language production N2pc Object naming

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Neuroscience
Psycholinguistics
Visual Attention

Background:

Speech production involves planning utterances while speaking.
Previous research linked eye movements to speech planning for visually presented objects.
Covert attention, without eye movements, can precede object fixation and naming.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate if electroencephalography (EEG) can monitor covert attention allocation during speech production.
To examine how processing difficulty affects attention shifts during object description tasks.
To understand the temporal dynamics of attention in relation to speech planning and object naming.

Main Methods:

Used EEG to record brain activity, specifically the N2pc component, during object description tasks.
Varied object processing difficulty by presenting objects in upright (easy) or upside-down (difficult) orientations.
Employed flickering background squares to elicit steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) for reference.

Main Results:

The N2pc component successfully tracked attention shifts to objects before and during speech onset.
Attention shifted to objects in the order they were mentioned, prior to speech.
Increased processing difficulty led to longer attention durations for objects.
Early attention allocation to the second object was observed between 200-350ms post-stimulus onset.

Conclusions:

The N2pc component is a viable neural marker for tracking covert attention during object naming tasks.
Processing difficulty modulates the time course of attention allocation in speech production.
These findings elucidate the coordination between visual information processing and motor output in speaking.