Visual Attention and Perception: Locations, Objects, and Organization

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Seeing and acting upon the visual world requires more than the passive registration of visual information. Also required is intentional knowledge-based control over that incoming information. The goal of this research is to investigate the coordination between the relatively passive processes of visual perception and the more active processes of visual attention. Past research has shed light on many aspects of the perceptual organization of incoming information, including the separation of figure from ground, the completion of objects behind occluding surfaces, and the compensation for spurious information such as shadows. The present project concerns when and how the active selection of information occurs relative to when and how the processes of perceptual organization come into play. These issues will be addressed by introducing into traditional visual-attention paradigms manipulations for probing the state of perceptual processes. For example, one such paradigm is visual search, which is a laboratory analogue for real-life visual tasks in which an organism searches its environment for interesting objects, such as mates, predators, and food. To perform this task the participant must guide his or her attention through the scene in an active search for the desired item. The interaction between this guidance of attention and the discounting of spurious changes in illumination will be probed by casting shadows across the display. The results will tell us whether and how the guidance of attention is disrupted by spurious information like shadows, thereby informing us about when compensation for shadows occurs relative to attentional guidance. Enhanced understanding of the coordination between perceptual processing and intentional control over that processing will be useful in a number of domains. First, any situation in which a person must engage in multiple subtasks simultaneously (e.g., during driving, flight-control, and sports) requires this coordination. Basing the development of tools for use in these situations on knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of the human system will increase the probability of their success. Similarly, knowledge of how humans naturally coordinate perception and attention will be useful for deciding how to present information most effectively (e.g., for medical imaging and other complex data sets).