Neural underpinnings of attention in the real world: Insights from co-registration of eye movements and EEG

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Visual attention plays a fundamental role in many tasks that have important consequences for the daily lives of Americans. Two primary tasks are visual search (e.g., identifying signs of cancer in medical images, or weapons in TSA baggage scans) and reading text (e.g., learning inside and outside of the classroom). Eye movements play a critical role in both tasks, but most cognitive neuroscience methods (e.g., electroencephalography; EEG) require research participants to refrain from moving the eyes because doing so produces artifacts in the neural measurements, which make the brain processes of interest harder to study. However, when eye movements are restricted, the inferences made in these neuroscience studies are somewhat removed from the phenomena being studied. New analytic techniques may allow these fields to move beyond simplified laboratory paradigms but this transition requires significant technological and analytic advances. The long-term goal is to create documentation of “best practices” and frameworks for future research applications that promote the best work using a combination of eye tracking and electroencephalography methods. Such guidelines should also foster reliability and reproducibility of studies and allow better integration of theoretical insights across scientific domains.The goal of this workshop is to bring together leading experts from different scientific fields to address the methodological and conceptual challenges of integrating eye tracking and electroencephalography methods. The primary outcome will be to advance the impact of these fields on the lives of everyday people. As examples, better understanding of why TSA screeners misclassify images can lead to better detection of real threats while reducing the negative impact of screener bias on marginalized individuals and better understanding of how eye movement behavior relates to underlying neural processing during reading can lead to faster, easier, and less-invasive detection of reading disorders such as dyslexia. The workshop will promote improved teaching, training, and learning by bringing together researchers at several career stages (from graduate students to senior researchers) with diverse backgrounds and in different domains of visual cognition to discuss the benefits and challenges of integrating methodological approaches in these domains. The workshop format, which includes invited talks, small-group panels, poster sessions, and brainstorming 'pitch' sessions, is specifically designed to engender cross-talk between junior and senior researchers in a way that spans disciplinary boundaries.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.