Images in the mind: The control of visual object selection by attentional templates

我们对外部视觉世界的感知以及我们与这个世界互动的方式受到我们当前的期望、意图和以前的经验的强烈影响。尽管我们可能主观地认为我们的意识体验和行动主要是由外部世界决定的，但在任何给定时刻，我们的感知和对外部世界的反应都是由我们活跃的大脑决定的。我们意识到什么是由我们所关注的决定的，而我们所关注的是由“脑海中的图像”（注意力模板）决定的，它引导我们的注意力与我们的目标和偏好保持一致。威廉·詹姆斯（William James）早在1890年就强调了主动引导思维在控制注意力方面的重要作用，但令人惊讶的是，我们对注意力模板的本质，以及这些模板如何决定在任何时候关注哪个对象，所知甚少。在这里提出的研究中，我们将采用新的实验程序和新的方法技术（包括在观察者从事注意力选择任务时获得的暂时精确的脑电活动测量）来回答实验心理学家争论了一个多世纪的一些基本问题。我们将调查一下我们在任何时候可以处理多少件事情，并期望发现威廉·詹姆斯提出的答案（“不容易多于一件”）可能是正确的。我们将研究在知觉、视觉工作记忆和行动中必须同时注意多个物体的不良后果。在同时处理多件事情的能力上，个体之间是否存在系统性差异？这种能力是否与年龄有关，是否可以通过训练来提高？我们还将研究“脑海中的图像”是如何组织的：注意力模板是代表完整的视觉对象，还是包含定义当前目标对象的视觉特征列表？这个问题的答案将对当前关于注意力如何运作的理论模型产生重要影响。最后，也是非常重要的一点，我们将开发新的方法来精确测量自发视觉注意力转移的速度：如果注意力集中在一个特定的位置，它能以多快的速度转移到一个新的可能相关的物体上？如果我们想把注意力引导到另一个物体上，我们能多快地改变“脑海中的形象”？我们的初步结果表明，自上而下的注意力引导可能比通常认为的要快得多，也更灵活，我们现在将发现这是否以及在哪种情况下是如此。“头脑中的图像”如何控制有意识的经验和自愿的行动，这个问题是选择性注意理论的核心。寻找这个问题的新答案将对注意力研究具有重要的一般理论和概念意义。但从应用的角度来看，我们的研究也很重要。在我们这个科技发达的社会中，生活的一个决定性特征是多种信息来源之间的注意力竞争，这导致了对注意力对象选择和选择的永久需求。关于注意力模板如何引导个人感知以及他们如何选择行动的新见解，对教育、工作场所设计和经济决策等不同领域具有明显的实际意义。

Our perception of the external visual world and the ways in which we interact with this world are strongly affected by our current expectations, intentions, and our previous experience. Even though we may subjectively feel that our conscious experiences and our actions are primarily determined by the outside world, it is our active mind that shapes what we perceive and how we react to the external world at any given moment. What we become aware of is determined by what we attend to, and what we attend to is determined by "images in the mind" (attentional templates) that guide our attention in line with our goals and preferences. The essential role of the active guiding mind in the control of attention was already highlighted by William James in 1890, but we still know surprisingly little about the nature of attentional templates, and about how these templates determine which object(s) are attended at any time. In the research proposed here, we will apply new experimental procedures and new methodological techniques (including temporally precise measures of electrical brain activity obtained while observers are engaged in attentional selection tasks) to answer some of the fundamental questions that have been debated by experimental psychologists for more than a century. We will investigate how many things we can attend to at any time, and expect to find that the answer suggested by William James ("not easily more than one") may be correct. We will study the adverse consequences of having to simultaneously attend to multiple objects in perception, visual working memory, and action. Are there systematic differences between individuals in their ability to attend to more than one thing at a time? Is this ability age-dependent and can it be improved by training? We will also investigate how the "image in the mind" is organised: Do attentional templates represent integral visual objects, or do they include lists of the visual features that define a current goal object? An answer to this question will have important consequences for current theoretical models of how attention operates. Finally, and very importantly, we will develop new methods to obtain precise measures of the speed of voluntary visual attention shifts: If attention is engaged at a particular location, how fast can it be moved to a new potentially relevant object? And how fast can we change the "image in the mind" if we want to guide our attention to a different object? Our initial results suggest that the top-down guidance of attention can be much faster and is more flexible than is usually believed, and we will now find out whether and under which circumstances this is the case. The question how "images in the mind" control conscious experience and voluntary action is central to theories of selective attention. Finding new answers to this question will have important general theoretical and conceptual implications for attention research. But our research is also important from an applied perspective. A defining feature of life in our technologically advanced society is the attentional competition between multiple sources of information, which result in permanent demands on attentional object selection and choice. New insights into how attentional templates guide what individuals perceive and how they choose to act therefore has obvious practical implications for areas as diverse as education, workplace design, and economic decision making.