Researcher Starter Grant

这些NSF启动资金将支持一年的研究基础设施的PI谁刚刚完成了NSF少数博士后奖学金，现在在伊利诺伊大学/厄巴纳-香槟分校认知神经科学的终身职位。资金将为一个研究快速恢复现象的拟议项目提供研究支持，该项目是PI在不列颠哥伦比亚省大学获得NSF博士后研究金期间发现的（NSF奖#0309998）。最初进行的实验在一篇论文中进行了描述，该论文被接受发表在心理科学杂志上，这是该领域领先的同行评议期刊。该项目的重点是快速恢复，这是指人类在中断后恢复搜索的能力比最初开始搜索的能力强得多的现象。研究人员使用一种被称为中断搜索的范式来研究这种现象。在该范例中，向参与者展示视觉搜索显示持续短暂的时间段（“看”时间= 100 ms），与空白显示（“等待”时间= 900 ms）交替。由于任务的难度，参与者不能只看一眼显示器就完成搜索，因此，被迫中断他们的搜索行为，直到搜索显示器重新出现。在这种中断条件下，研究人员发现参与者非常善于恢复搜索（通过每次显示重现后的快速反应时间来衡量），因此被称为快速恢复（RR）。结果表明，当参与者“迅速恢复”搜索任务时，他们这样做没有先前的意识知识，也没有任何关于目标身份的直觉。因此，研究人员将RR解释为一种“快速感知”的情况，这种情况是由于视觉过程（在搜索期间发挥作用）和记忆过程（在中断期间发挥作用）之间的相互作用而产生的。该项目的目标是继续研究这一现象，以便更好地了解视觉和记忆在搜索过程中如何相互作用，以及更普遍地说，这些系统如何相互作用，以提供对我们周围世界的稳定感知表示。 在这个项目中，提出了九个具体的实验来研究RR（不包括可能需要的试点和/或后续研究）。这项工作将推进我们对人类重要的日常行为的认识：人类是如何搜索环境的，特别是在他们必须反复中断搜索行为的情况下（我们经常必须这样做）。其次，它将为我们提供关于两个重要认知系统之间相互作用的新见解：记忆和视觉。研究这些相互作用的性质也将增强我们对涉及这两个系统的各种其他认知现象的理解（例如，变化盲视、无意盲视和情境线索等）。第三，这条线的研究首先是对“复牌”行为进行调查，即，重新开始之前中断的任务虽然大多数关于任务转换的研究都发现了从一项任务转换到另一项任务的认知成本，但这是第一项研究表明人类有自然能力回到先前开始的任务。主要研究者致力于将研究作为本科和研究生阶段的教育体验，并通过在专业会议上的演讲和在同行评审期刊上的出版物传播研究成果。此外，通过支持这个项目，NSF将支持西班牙裔在心理学领域的参与。最后，这项工作的更广泛意义延伸到研究人类操作员如何与复杂系统交互的应用领域，在这些领域中，他们通常必须同时执行多项任务。这项工作有可能以这样一种方式扩展，即可以制定指导方针，减轻通常在多任务环境中存在的一些认知成本（例如，通过允许操作员快速返回到以前未完成的任务，以便他们可以快速恢复它）。

These NSF Starter Grant Funds will support one year of research infrastructure for a PI who has just completed an NSF Minority Post-Doc Fellowship and is now in a tenure-track position in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign. Funds will provide research support for a proposed project examining the phenomenon of Rapid Resumption, which the PI discovered during his NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of British Columbia (NSF award #0309998). The initial experiments conducted are described in a paper accepted for publication in the journal Psychological Science, a leading peer reviewed journal in the field. The project focuses on Rapid Resumption, which refers to the phenomenon that humans are much better at resuming a search after an interruption, than they are at initially starting the search. The phenomenon is studied using a paradigm that the researchers call interrupted search. In this paradigm, participants are shown a visual search display for a brief period of time ("look" time = 100 ms) in alternation with a blank display ("wait" time = 900 ms). Because of the task difficulty, participants cannot finish the search with just one look at the display and therefore, are forced to interrupt their search behavior until the search display re-appears. Under such interruption conditions, the researchers showed that participants are very good at resuming their search (as measured by very fast reaction times following each display reappearance), thus the name of Rapid Resumption (RR). The results showed that when participants "rapidly resume" the search task, they do so with no previous conscious knowledge nor any intuition about the target identity. Thus, the researchers interpreted RR as a case of "rapid perception" that comes about because of interactions between visual processes (at play during search) and memory processes (at play during the interruptions). The goal of this project is to continue the study of this phenomenon so that a better understanding can be achieved on how vision and memory interact during search, and more generally, how these systems interact to provide a stable perceptual representation of the world around us. In this project, nine specific experiments are proposed to study RR (not including pilot and/or follow-up studies that may be necessary). The proposed work will advance our knowledge of an important everyday human behavior: how is it that humans search their environment, particularly under conditions where they have to repeatedly interrupt their search behavior (as we often must do). Second, it will provide us with new insights regarding the interactions between two important cognitive systems: memory and vision. Studying the nature of these interactions will also enhance our understanding of various other cognitive phenomena where these two systems are involved (e.g., Change Blindness, Inattentional Blindness, and Contextual Cueing among others). Third, this line of research is the first to investigate the act of "resumption", i.e., of reengaging on a previously interrupted task. While most research on the task-switching literature has found cognitive costs to switching from one task to another, this is the first research to show a natural ability for humans to go back to a previously started task. The principal investigator is committed to using research as an educational experience, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels and to disseminate research findings via presentations at professional conferences and publications in peer-reviewed journals. Also, by supporting this project, the NSF will be supporting the participation of Hispanics in the field of psychology. Last, the broader significance of this work extends to applied fields studying how human operators interact with complex systems, in which they often have to perform multiple tasks in tandem. The work has the potential to be extended in such a way that guidelines may be able to be developed that would alleviate some of the cognitive costs usually present in multi-task environments (for example, by allowing operators to quickly return to a previously unfinished task, so that they may rapidly resume it).