CAREER: Attentional Inhibition to Selected-and-Rejected Visual Features and Categories

想象一下，在一群你的男性朋友中寻找你的女性朋友。这一次你能否成功地找到你的女朋友，将在一定程度上决定你将来在同样的任务中会取得多大的成功。这项拟议的研究将考察这样一个问题，即感知者先前的视觉体验如何影响感知者关注并最终看到世界的后续过程。这项研究的基础是，通过在一群男性(分心)中寻找女性(目标)，视觉注意系统产生了对关注男性面孔的偏见。这种对分心物的抑制偏见会随着时间的推移而持续存在，因此会影响感知者对未来任何包含男性面孔的场景的关注，或者影响分心物的同一类别中的任何刺激。这项研究将使用不同的任务来考察这种偏见及其在视觉加工中的影响，例如，这种偏见是否存在于空间搜索(寻找物体)和时间搜索(在一系列短暂呈现的物体中寻找物体的外观)的语境中。研究项目开始解决一个基本问题，即我们先前的视觉经验如何影响我们在随后的视觉信息处理中将在哪里、什么以及如何观看场景。研究人员致力于将研究和培训活动整合到这个职业项目中，将该项目作为功能神经成像的培训机会，研究造成这些基于经验的注意力偏差的大脑机制。此外，调查员将整合本科生和研究生的研究和教育活动，积极让学生参与项目，并开发课程，为学生提供独立研究的工具和理论知识。最后，该项目还将开启研究人类注意力缺陷和抑制性控制缺陷的大门，如注意力缺陷障碍、强迫症、抑郁症、执行控制功能障碍、精神分裂症和痴呆症。作为一名西班牙裔背景的研究人员，调查者在提高少数群体在一般科学，特别是认知心理学中的代表性和可见性方面处于独特的地位。

Imagine looking for a female friend of yours in a crowd filled with your male friends. How successful you are at finding your female friend this time around will partly determine how successful you will be in the future at the same task. The proposed research will examine the question of how perceiver's prior visual experience affects subsequent processes in which the perceiver attends to and ultimately sees the world. The research builds on the finding that by looking for a female (target) within a group of males (distractors), the visual attention system creates a bias against attending to male faces. Such an inhibitory bias against distractors persists over time and will consequently affect how the perceiver attends to any future scene that contains male faces or any stimuli within the same category of the distractor. The proposed research will use a variety of tasks to examine such biases and their consequences in visual processing, for example, whether the bias exists in the context of both spatial search (looking for an object) and temporal search (looking for the appearance of an object, within a stream of briefly presented objects).The research project begins to address a fundamental question that has not received much research attention, that is, how our prior visual experience affects where, what and how we will look at a scene in subsequent visual information processing. The investigator is committed to integrating research and training activities in this CAREER project by using the project as a training opportunity in functional neuroimaging to study the brain mechanisms involved in creating these experience-based biases of attention. Further, the investigator will integrate research and education activities at the undergraduate and graduate levels, by actively involving students in the projects and by developing courses that will provide students with the tools and the theoretical knowledge for independent research. Finally, the project will also open the door to study attention-based deficits in humans and deficits in inhibitory control, such as Attention Deficit Disorders, Obsessive Compulsive Disorders, Depression, Executive Control Function Impairments, Schizophrenia and Dementia. As a researcher of Hispanic background, the investigator is in a unique position to improve minority representation and visibility in science in general and cognitive psychology in particular.