Imagine a busy restaurant: dishes clattering, music playing and people talking loudly. It’s a wonder that anyone in that environment can focus enough. In an earlier study. researchers established that people can separately control how much they focus (by enhancing relevant information) and how much they filter (by tuning out distraction).

Recently, Neuroscientist Ritz compared the process to muscle coordination (协调) in his study: “In the same way that we bring together more than 50 muscles to perform a physical task like using chopsticks, our study found we can coordinate different forms of attention in order to perform brain activities.”

To explore this, Ritz administered a cognitive task to participants while measuring their brain activity. Participants saw a mass of green and purple dots moving left and right. The tasks involved distinguishing between the movement and colors of the dots. For example, participants in one exercise had to select which color was in the majority for the rapidly moving dots with purple and green percentages close to 50/50.

“You can regard the intraparietal sulcus (脑顶内沟) as a radio dial with two knobs. one for focusing and one for filtering,” Ritz said, “When the anterior cingulate cortex (前扣带皮层) recognizes that, for instance, motion is making the task more difficult, it directs the intraparietal sulcus to adjust the filtering knob to reduce the sensitivity to motion and might also direct the intraparetal sulcus to adjust the focusing knob to increase the sensitivity to color. Now the relevant brain regions are less sensitive to motion and more sensitive to the color, so the participant can make better selection.

Nowadays, much is still being explored about attention coordination. A partnership with scientists at Brown University is investigating focus and-filter strategies in patients with treatment-resistant depression; one study co-led by Rita and Brown Ph,D. students examines the impact of financial rewards and penalties (处罚) on focus -and-filter strategies. “We all know there is still a considerable journey ahead.” Ritz said.

【小题1】What is the main focus of the new study?

A．The process behind brain activities in humans.

B．The relationship between mental state and attention.

C．The mechanism of focusing and filtering coordination.

D．The impart of noisy environment on humans attention.

【小题2】What role does the dots’ movement play in the task?

A．A distractor for participants.	B．A tracking target for the test.
C．A main factor to evaluate the task.	D．A warning for participants to focus.

【小题3】What does the underlined word “it” in paragraph 4 refer to?

A．The focusing knob.	B．The intraparietal sulcus.
C．The filtering knob.	D．The anterior cingulate cortes.

【小题4】What can we infer from the last paragraph?

A．There are some challenges of the attention research.

B．Ongoing research projects are based on these findings.

C．Focus-and-filter strategies can solve depression problems.

D．Motivation ways to drive attention are well applied in treatment.