Attention and the Representation of Scenes and Objects

想象一下，在一条繁忙的街道上开车，街上挤满了行人、其他车辆、交通标志和信号，以及潜在的道路危险。为了安全地行驶在这条街上，一个人必须不断地意识到所有这些刺激，准备好对任何变化做出反应。如果一个人能够一次保持对所有这些信息的心理表征，那么处理这种复杂性就相对简单了。然而，最近的证据表明，“心灵之眼”对世界的心理表征远没有世界本身那么详细。例如，人们经常没有注意到周围环境的巨大变化，这导致一些人认为，大部分视觉环境在大脑的眼睛里并不持续。为什么我们要记住我们周围环境的某些方面，而不是其他方面？关键似乎在于大脑眼睛中被称为视觉注意力的“焦点”：我们特别关注周围环境的那些方面更有可能持续存在于我们的脑海中。因此，为了理解世界在大脑中的持续表现，有必要研究影响大脑眼睛专注的因素。在国家科学基金会的支持下，罗伯特·戈登博士将研究大脑眼睛是如何发展和维持大脑中有意义的场景和物体的。戈登博士结合了三种对感知的最早时刻非常敏感的方法，并辩称之前的研究没有使用过这种方法。戈登博士实验中的参与者观看描绘熟悉环境的全彩场景。在一些实验中，将对他们的注意力分布进行评估，以确定决定人们在观看有意义的场景时注意到哪里的因素。在其他实验中，将研究注意选择对这些场景的表征的结果。总之，实验结果将有助于揭示人们感知和理解视觉信息的过程。更广泛的影响包括对显示器设计的影响，在这种显示器中，用户必须快速提取视觉信息。此外，该项目将通过支持为研究做出贡献的研究生和本科生来整合研究和教育目标。

Imagine driving down a busy street full of pedestrians, other cars, traffic signs and signals, and potential road hazards. In order to drive safely down this street, one must be continuously aware of all of these stimuli, ready to react to any changes. Dealing with this complexity would be relatively straightforward if one were able to maintain a mental representation of all of this information at once. Recent evidence, however, suggests that mental representations of the world in the "mind's eye" are not nearly as detailed as the world itself. For example, people routinely fail to notice large changes in their surroundings, leading some to suggest that much of the visual environment is not sustained in the mind's eye. Why do we keep some aspects of our surroundings in mind and not others? The key appears to lie in the "focus" of the mind's eye called visual attention: those aspects of our surroundings that we give particular attention to are more likely to be sustained in mind. To understand the sustained representation of the world in the mind, therefore, it is necessary to examine the factors that influence focus of the mind's eye.With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Robert Gordon will examine how the mind's eye develops and sustains meaningful scenes and objects within the mind. Dr. Gordon combines three approaches that are sensitive to the very earliest moments of perception and argues that previous studies have not used such approaches. Participants in Dr. Gordon's experiments view full-color scenes depicting familiar environments. In some experiments, the distribution of their attention will be assessed in order to identify the factors that determine where people pay attention while viewing meaningful scenes. In other experiments, the consequences of attentional selection for the representation of such scenes will be investigated. Together, the results of the experiments will help reveal the processes that allow people to perceive and comprehend visual information. Broader impacts include implications for the design of displays in which users must rapidly extract visual information. Moreover, the project will integrate research and educational goals by supporting graduate and undergraduate students who contribute to the research.