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

视觉注意力在许多对美国人的日常生活有重要影响的任务中扮演着重要的角色。两项主要任务是视觉搜索(例如，在医学图像中识别癌症迹象，或在TSA行李扫描中识别武器)和阅读文本(例如，在教室内外学习)。眼球运动在这两项任务中都发挥着关键作用，但大多数认知神经科学方法(例如，脑电图术；EEG)要求研究参与者避免移动眼睛，因为这样做会在神经测量中产生伪影，使感兴趣的大脑过程更难研究。然而，当眼球运动受到限制时，这些神经科学研究中做出的推论在某种程度上会从正在研究的现象中移除。新的分析技术可能会使这些领域超越简化的实验室范例，但这种转变需要重大的技术和分析进步。长期目标是为未来的研究应用创建“最佳实践”和框架的文档，以促进结合使用眼睛跟踪和脑电方法的最佳工作。这样的指导方针还应该促进研究的可靠性和重复性，并允许更好地整合跨科学领域的理论见解。这次研讨会的目标是将来自不同科学领域的领先专家聚集在一起，解决整合眼睛跟踪和脑电方法的方法学和概念性挑战。主要成果将是促进这些领域对日常生活的影响。例如，更好地了解TSA筛查员错误分类图像的原因可以更好地检测真正的威胁，同时减少筛查员偏见对边缘化个人的负面影响，以及更好地了解阅读过程中眼动行为与潜在神经处理的关系，可以更快、更容易、更少地检测阅读障碍等阅读障碍。讲习班将促进改进教学、培训和学习，将具有不同背景和不同视觉认知领域的几个职业阶段(从研究生到高级研究人员)的研究人员聚集在一起，讨论在这些领域整合方法学方法的好处和挑战。研讨会的形式包括受邀演讲、小组讨论、海报会议和集思广益的推介会议，旨在以一种跨越学科边界的方式在初级和高级研究人员之间产生交叉对话。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.