Persisting Objects and the Nature of Attention and Memory

描述（由申请人提供）：我们睁开眼睛，立刻感受到一个丰富而稳定的世界。这一切发生得如此轻松，以至于我们常常把我们的视觉系统所面临的挑战视为理所当然，即拼凑我们从落在视网膜上的光线中看到的东西。视觉注意和视觉工作记忆是至关重要的资源，没有它们，这个过程就不可能发生。如此多的信息进入我们的眼睛，以至于如果视觉系统试图分析这些信息，它将一无所获。注意和记忆通过只处理和存储相关信息来防止这种信息溢出。但是注意力和记忆是如何准确地知道世界的哪些部分是相关的呢？部分原因是它们在视觉体验的重要单元上起作用，认知科学的一个核心项目是确定注意力和记忆选择的单元是什么。这个重要的问题已经得到了大量的研究，目前的证据表明，至少在某些情况下，注意力和记忆在受限的对象表征上运作。它们是基于对象的。然而，大多数研究都集中在对象的静态性质上，通常是将绑定对象与未绑定对象在空间中的特征和位置进行对比。这忽略了现实世界经验中物体的内在动态特性。拟议的研究旨在扩展我们对物体的概念，包括物体在运动、遮挡和外观变化的情况下保持其身份的重要事实。因此，提出的研究探索了支持持久对象表示的构建和维护的规则和机制。此外，提出的实验通过关注其对注意力和记忆的影响来探索持久的对象表征。这反映了表征这些资源的一种新方法。这个项目并没有对注意力和记忆的潜在本质提出独立的问题，而是从一个统一的角度来看待这两个重要的资源。因此，这个项目的中心目标是证明持久对象的表征构成了认知的底层词汇，最终指导我们如何关注世界，如何记忆世界，甚至如何对世界进行推理。这些实验的结果将对我们理解注意力和记忆等基本资源受损的疾病（如多动症、阿尔茨海默病）产生影响。这些结果还将对信息的有效呈现产生影响，特别是在为受损人群设计干预措施和为认知要求高的情况（例如空中交通管制）设计界面方面。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): We open our eyes and we instantly perceive a rich and stable world. This happens so effortlessly that we often take for granted the challenges that our visual systems face in piecing together what we see from the light that lands on our retinas. Visual attention and visual working memory are crucial resources without which this process would be impossible. So much information enters our eyes that the visual system would get nowhere if it tried to analyze it all. Attention and memory preclude this kind of information overflow by processing and storing only relevant information. But how do attention and memory know exactly which bits of the world are the relevant ones? Part of the answer is that they operate over important units in visual experience, and a central project in cognitive science is to determine what are the units that attention and memory select. This important question has received a significant amount of research, and current evidence suggests that, at least in some situations, attention and memory operate over bound object representations. They are object-based. However, most research has focused on the static nature of objects, typically contrasting bound objects with unbound features and locations in space. This neglects the intrinsically dynamic nature of objects in real-world experience. The proposed research seeks to expand our conception of what it means to be an object to include the important fact that objects maintain their identities over time despite motion, occlusion, and changes in appearance. Thus the proposed research explores the rules and mechanisms that support the construction and maintenance of persisting object representations. Moreover, the proposed experiments explore persisting object representations by focusing on their consequences for attention and memory. This reflects a new way of characterizing these resources. Rather than asking independent questions about the underlying nature of attention and memory, the proposed project looks at both of these crucial resources from a unifying perspective. Thus a central aim of this project is to demonstrate that representations of persisting objects comprise a piece of the underlying vocabulary of cognition, ultimately guiding how we attend to the world, how we remember it, and even how we reason about it. The results of these experiments will have implications for our understanding of disorders where basic resources such as attention and memory are impaired (e.g. ADHD, Alzheimer's disease). These results will also have implications for the effective presentation of information, especially in the design of interventions for impaired populations and in the design of interfaces for cognitively demanding situations (e.g. air-traffic control).