Researcher Starter Grant

这些NSF初学者赠款基金将为一名PI提供一年的研究基础设施，他刚刚完成了NSF少数民族博士后奖学金，现在是伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校认知神经科学的终身教职。基金将为一个研究快速恢复现象的拟议项目提供研究支持，这是PI在不列颠哥伦比亚大学担任国家科学基金会博士后研究员期间发现的(国家科学基金会奖#0309998)。最初进行的实验在接受发表在《心理科学》杂志上的一篇论文中进行了描述，该杂志是该领域领先的同行评议期刊。该项目专注于快速恢复，这是指人类在中断后恢复搜索的能力比最初开始搜索时要好得多的现象。研究人员使用一种被称为中断搜索的范式来研究这一现象。在该范例中，参与者被显示短时间段的可视搜索显示(“看”时间=100毫秒)和空白显示(“等待”时间=900毫秒)。由于任务难度，参与者不能只看一眼显示屏就完成搜索，因此被迫中断他们的搜索行为，直到搜索显示屏重新出现。在这样的中断条件下，研究人员表明，参与者非常善于恢复他们的搜索(通过每次显示再现后非常快的反应时间来衡量)，因此被称为快速恢复(RR)。结果表明，当被试“迅速恢复”搜索任务时，他们在没有事先有意识的知识和对目标身份的任何直觉的情况下这样做。因此，研究人员将RR解释为一种“快速感知”的情况，这是由于视觉过程(在搜索过程中发挥作用)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。这个项目的目标是继续研究这一现象，以便更好地理解视觉和记忆在搜索过程中是如何相互作用的，以及更广泛地说，这些系统是如何相互作用以提供对我们周围世界的稳定知觉表征的。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)。这项拟议的工作将促进我们对一项重要的日常人类行为的了解：人类如何搜索他们的环境，特别是在他们不得不反复中断他们的搜索行为的情况下(正如我们经常必须做的那样)。其次，它将为我们提供关于记忆和视觉这两个重要认知系统之间相互作用的新见解。研究这些相互作用的性质也将加深我们对这两个系统涉及的其他各种认知现象的理解(例如，改变盲、注意盲和语境提示等)。第三，这一领域的研究是第一次研究“恢复”的行为，即重新投入到先前中断的任务中。虽然大多数关于任务切换文献的研究都发现，从一个任务切换到另一个任务会产生认知成本，但这是第一次有研究表明，人类天生有能力回到之前开始的任务中去。首席调查员致力于将研究作为本科生和研究生的一种教育经验，并通过在专业会议上发表演讲和在同行评议期刊上发表文章来传播研究成果。此外，通过支持这一项目，国家科学基金会将支持拉美裔美国人参与心理学领域。最后，这项工作的更广泛的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，在复杂系统中，他们经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，即能够制定指导方针，减轻多任务环境中通常存在的一些认知成本(例如，允许操作员快速返回到以前未完成的任务，以便他们可以迅速恢复该任务)。

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).