Andrew B. Leber - US grants

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Humans continually learn relationships between the tasks they perform during their daily routines and the context in which the tasks are executed. The chief concern of the proposed research regards how these learned relationships are capitalized upon to influence behavior. In particular, this project aims to examine how contextual information from the visual environment impacts how attentional set--a preparatory state of the visual system that prioritizes the selection and inspection of visual information based upon a defining characteristic of the target (e.g., red or vertical)--is implemented and reconfigured. An initial approach seeks to determine if, and how, the implementation of an attentional set can be automatically triggered by an implicitly learned visual context. A second approach will probe the role of context in the reconfiguration from one attentional set to another. A third approach seeks to examine the neural mechanisms underlying context-driven set reconfiguration. To explore these questions, behavioral experiments and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) will be carried out with normal human subjects.

Humans receive far more visual information in each moment than they can possibly process. A major question is how people attend to the information that is most relevant to their current goals and ignore distracting, irrelevant information. One strategy is that people focus their attention on specific properties of objects, such as their color, shape, or location. However, previous research has shown that people do not always control their attention in an optimal way. Additionally, little is known about the factors motivating how people choose to control their attention. The current project will investigate the role of three factors that may influence how attention is controlled: 1) performance maximization (the drive to achieve a goal as quickly as possible); 2) effort minimization (avoiding tasks that are cognitively taxing); and 3) novelty-seeking (exploring new stimuli in the environment). Using a new method to measure all three of these factors, the research team will establish each individual's unique "Attention Control Profile." Providing a detailed analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of an individual's attentional control strategies may have important implications for screening and training employees in professions that depend heavily on attentional control, such as drivers, security agents, and air traffic controllers. The Attention Control Profile may also be helpful for assessing attentional control deficits in special populations, such as individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), schizophrenia, or damage to frontal or parietal brain regions. In addition to the broader scientific contributions, this project will provide training to undergraduate students, graduate students and post-doctoral researchers at The Ohio State University, with an emphasis on including women and members from groups underrepresented in science.

This project uses a combination of behavioral and eye-tracking measures to develop an Attention Control Profile for each participating individual, using a new visual search task that is designed to reproduce essential aspects of real-world search. The task allows individuals to choose freely among multiple different attentional control strategies, in order to find one of multiple possible search targets. Additionally, the task features a search display that varies continuously over time, which will prompt individuals to adjust their control strategies dynamically. The investigators will explore how effectively individuals choose search targets, adapt their control strategies to the changing environment, and ignore irrelevant information. This will, in turn, provide a metric for how much each individual's attentional control is influenced by performance maximization, effort minimization and novelty-seeking. The project also explores the underlying sources of individual variation in attentional control, by examining whether an individual's strategy depends on motivational state (e.g., when fast performance receives high rewards) or specific personality traits (e.g., impulsivity or deliberateness). These methods will enable the researchers to provide a tool for measuring individualized attentional control profiles and will help unpack the motivations underlying the use of different attentional control strategies.

This award will support the organization of a two-day workshop on Object Perception, Attention, and Memory (OPAM) on November 8-9, 2017 that will showcase graduate and postdoctoral research in visual cognition. The OPAM workshop will facilitate the exposure of, and networking among, early-career scientists. OPAM is free and accessible, features talks and poster presentations by graduate and postdoctoral researchers, and is a vital venue for professional development.

Current research in visual cognition spans a broad range of research topics (e.g., object, face, and scene recognition; visual attention; visual memory; eye movement control and active vision) and uses a wide variety of research tools. The award allows the OPAM workshop to be expanded to two days in order to allow more opportunities for presentations and introduces new programming designed to expand trainee access to mentoring, networking, and research ideas. The organizers have paid particular attention to the inclusion of women and members of under-represented groups as speakers, panelists, and panel moderators. The 2017 workshop will take place in Vancouver, Canada, which increases the opportunity for early-career scientists to establish international collaborations.

Whether one is navigating a bustling Times Square or hiking in a peaceful forest, their senses capture far more information than can possibly be processed fully. Fortunately, humans are endowed with the mechanisms of attention, which help to prioritize the sights, sounds, smells, etc., that are most behaviorally relevant (e,g., a person approaching instead of bright flashing lights on a billboard). While most people possess powerful abilities to use attention (e.g., searching for red things to find apples in a produce section), there is great variation in how strategically people use these abilities. For example, while most people have the ability to search for the color red to quickly find apples in a produce aisle, research has revealed that many people do not choose to apply this ability and, consequently, take longer to accomplish their task. The notion that one?s attentional strategies ? and not only their abilities -- can dictate their success in everyday tasks has significant societal implications. First, attentional strategies might explain how people perform at a number of attentionally demanding vocations, such as baggage screening, radar monitoring, driving, and more. Measuring strategy use could help determine suitability for these vocations. Additionally, learning how to improve attentional strategy could enhance job performance. Second, many disorders have an attentional component, especially ADHD and frontal lobe damage; understanding how strategy is used could help better characterize these disorders and open up potential paths to treatment.

The present research aims uses a wide variety of human behavioral and eye-tracking methods to investigate and characterize how individuals vary in their use of attentional strategy, with two primary approaches. First, using a novel experimental paradigm recently developed by the research team ? the Adaptive Choice Visual Search (ACVS) ? the researchers will explore how strategy use on one task generalizes to strategy use on other tasks. It will also examine the degree to which people?s subjective sense of effort contributes to their optimal (or non-optimal) use of strategy. That is, do some people avoid good strategies because they find these strategies to be effortful to use? Second, the research team will measure a variety of distinct strategy and ability metrics in a large sample of individuals to uncover hidden predictors of attentional strategy use across the population. This will help researchers to understand whether an individual?s attentional strategy across many contexts can be distilled to a single measurable trait or a more complex, heterogeneous set of traits.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.