Guidance of attention by task-irrelevant information

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Attentional selection is a mechanism by which sensory information that makes up our environment is selected for further, detailed, and more efficient processing. Given that attended information is privileged by the brain, understanding and predicting what information is granted access to brain processing becomes an important endeavor. It has been argued that salient events (those that are very different from the surrounding environment) as well as information that is related to the current goal (i.e., task-relevant) are granted such access. The current work aims to extend this arguably simple notion of attentional orienting, to test the hypothesis that attentional selection can depend on may factors other than salience and task relevance. A better understanding of critical factors that determine how attentional selection is distributed in a scene could be used in various applied fields such as: design of interactive and ergonomic panels (e.g., car dashboards, instrumental panels, airplane cockpits, air traffic control monitors); enhanced training programs across multiple industries ranging from training drivers and machine operators to security personnel (e.g., airport baggage screeners) to neurologists reading X-rays for evidence of cancer; and developing new beneficial rehabilitative programs for persons suffering from various attentional disorders (Attention Deficit Disorder, visuo-spatial neglect, etc.).Given a critical mass of knowledge acquired on how salient and task-relevant aspects of the scene contribute to attentional allocation, the time is ripe to probe various ways in which task-irrelevant properties of the environment constrain attentional allocation. The proposed research program tests a set of novel predictions regarding the influence of task-irrelevant properties of the scene to attentional selection. Our goal is to rigorously test the hypothesis that task-irrelevant information (such as semantics, affordances, size, diagnosticity), constrains attentional selection by directly acting on spatial and object representations. While extensive past research has demonstrated that relevant information constrains attentional selection, we ask a more fundamental question whether different types of task-irrelevant information impinge on attentional control even when not directly relevant to the current goal. Predictions will be tested in real world scenes, and by utilizing real world objects. Both, behavioral profile (with the use of various psychophysics and eye-movement techniques) as well as the neural underpinnings of this mechanism (by employing neuroimaging techniques), will be examined.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.