Learning to Attend, Attending to Learn: Neurological, Behavioral, and Computational Perspectives

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Attention and learning are two of the most important aspects of cognition. While studying attention and learning separately has its benefits, it is also misleading. In the past few years, there has emerged a new wave of research demonstrating that attention constrains learning and that learning guides future attention. The studies in these two areas span disparate fields (developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral neuroscience, computational modeling). Although researchers are asking the same questions across different fields, in general, they do not attend the same conferences, rarely cite each other, and in most cases do not even know about each other's work. This 2-day workshop will bring together these diverse researchers to catalyze further interaction and promote innovative collaborative research. The workshop also will include moderators, who will encourage constructive critiques and discussion of theoretical and methodological limitations for the different approaches. This workshop will solidify, stabilize, and grow this critical research area (especially for a new generation of researchers) and thereby promote a more nuanced, ecologically valid, and biologically informed understanding of attention-learning interactions and mechanisms. Research on attention and learning interactions is crucial for understanding a wide range of developmental processes, including infants' development of social skills, children's memory, perceptual-motor skill acquisition, and learning in school. It is also increasingly apparent that developmental disabilities originally thought to be attention-based, such as ADHD, interact heavily with learning difficulties, though the exact mechanisms are still unclear.