Clean air captures attention whereas pollution distracts: evidence from brain activities

Highlights

● We find air pollution distracts attention and reveal the neurocognitive mechanisms.

● Clean air captures more attention and evokes larger N300 amplitudes in all trials.

● Pollution causes lower accuracy and larger P300 wave in attention-holding trials.

● Pollution causes higher accuracy and lower P300 wave in attention-shifting trials.

Abstract

Awareness of the adverse impact of air pollution on attention-related performance such as learning and driving is rapidly growing. However, there is still little known about the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms. Using an adapted dot-probe task paradigm and event-related potential (ERP) technique, we investigated how visual stimuli of air pollution influence the attentional allocation process. Participants were required to make responses to the onset of a target presented at the left or right visual field. The probable location of the target was forewarned by a cue (pollution or clean air images), appearing at either the target location (attention-holding trials) or the opposite location (attention-shifting trials). Behavioral measures showed that when cued by pollution images, subjects had higher response accuracy in attention-shifting trials. ERP analysis results revealed that after the cue onset, pollution images evoked lower N300 amplitudes, indicating less attention-capturing effects of dirty air. After the target onset, pollution cues were correlated with the higher P300 amplitudes in attention-holding trials but lower amplitudes in attention-shifting trials. It indicates that after visual exposure to air pollution, people need more neurocognitive resources to maintain attention but less effort to shift attention away. The findings provide the first neuroscientific evidence for the distracting effect of air pollution. We conclude with several practical implications and suggest the ERP technique as a promising tool to understand human responses to environmental stressors.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

Air pollution / Attention / Disengagement / Performance / Event-related potential

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Acknowledgements

The study was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 71921003 and 72222012), the Jiangsu R&D Special Fund for Carbon Peaking and Carbon Neutrality (No. BK20220014), the Jiangsu Natural Science Foundation (No. BK20220125). Dr. Jianxun Yang acknowledges supports from the National Postdoctoral Program for Innovative Talent (No. BX20230159), the Yuxiu Young Scholar Postdoc Fellowship granted by Nanjing University, and Future Earth Early Career Fellowship granted by Future Earth Global Secretariat Hub-China.

Conflict of Interests

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Electronic Supplementary Material

Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11783-024-1801-x and is accessible for authorized users.

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2024 The Author(s) 2024. This article is published with open access at link.springer.com and journal.hep.com.cn