Developing a comprehensive profile of attentional control strategy

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Whether one is navigating a bustling Times Square or hiking in a peaceful forest, their senses capture far more information than can possibly be processed fully. Fortunately, humans are endowed with the mechanisms of attention, which help to prioritize the sights, sounds, smells, etc., that are most behaviorally relevant (e,g., a person approaching instead of bright flashing lights on a billboard). While most people possess powerful abilities to use attention (e.g., searching for red things to find apples in a produce section), there is great variation in how strategically people use these abilities. For example, while most people have the ability to search for the color red to quickly find apples in a produce aisle, research has revealed that many people do not choose to apply this ability and, consequently, take longer to accomplish their task. The notion that one’s attentional strategies – and not only their abilities -- can dictate their success in everyday tasks has significant societal implications. First, attentional strategies might explain how people perform at a number of attentionally demanding vocations, such as baggage screening, radar monitoring, driving, and more. Measuring strategy use could help determine suitability for these vocations. Additionally, learning how to improve attentional strategy could enhance job performance. Second, many disorders have an attentional component, especially ADHD and frontal lobe damage; understanding how strategy is used could help better characterize these disorders and open up potential paths to treatment.The present research aims uses a wide variety of human behavioral and eye-tracking methods to investigate and characterize how individuals vary in their use of attentional strategy, with two primary approaches. First, using a novel experimental paradigm recently developed by the research team – the Adaptive Choice Visual Search (ACVS) – the researchers will explore how strategy use on one task generalizes to strategy use on other tasks. It will also examine the degree to which people’s subjective sense of effort contributes to their optimal (or non-optimal) use of strategy. That is, do some people avoid good strategies because they find these strategies to be effortful to use? Second, the research team will measure a variety of distinct strategy and ability metrics in a large sample of individuals to uncover hidden predictors of attentional strategy use across the population. This will help researchers to understand whether an individual’s attentional strategy across many contexts can be distilled to a single measurable trait or a more complex, heterogeneous set of traits.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.