CAREER: Individuation in Visual Cognition

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Many visual tasks require that we divide attention across multiple locations at once. We need this ability for everyday tasks, from counting a set of chairs before a dinner party to navigating complex traffic during rush hour. We also need this ability at school or at work, when following the complex layout of a diagram or finding differences among values within graphs. In these kinds of tasks there is a surprising limit to our ability to split our attention and we can typically deal with only a few locations at once. The ubiquity of this limitation has led to its acceptance as a fundamental limit on visual processing, yet we have little understanding of why it happens. With the support of an NSF CAREER Award, Dr. Franconeri, Northwestern University, will test the possibility that these limits stem from a bottleneck within a cognitive 'map' of attended locations in the world. Understanding the limits of divided attention could lead to important changes in the ways that we organize information in graphs and diagrams and may offer critical insight into our understanding of how children learn to count. It may also lead to better understanding of visual processing differences in autistic populations, who have greater difficulty dividing their attention. This research will be integrated with an education plan that includes (1) outreach to the general public through the design of a "Brain Week" series as well as other outreach talks in the Chicago area, (2) curriculum development, (3) advising of students and researchers from high school to postdoctoral levels, (4) outreach to underrepresented groups via recruitment to both Northwestern and the investigator's laboratory, including a summer fellowship for a local student from an under-represented background, and (5) collaborative outreach to related disciplines including education and information visualization.