Persisting Objects and the Nature of Attention and Memory

持久性物体以及注意力和记忆的本质

• 批准号: 7231163
• 负责人: JONATHAN I FLOMBAUM
• 金额: $ 4.3万
• 依托单位: YALE UNIVERSITY
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2006
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2006-09-26 至 2008-09-25
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/7231163
• 关键词: attention; behavioral /social science research tag; clinical research; cognition; human subject; memory; motion perception; neural information processing; predoctoral investigator; space perception; visual perception; visual stimulus

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).

描述(申请人提供)：我们睁开眼睛，立刻就能看到一个丰富稳定的世界。这是如此毫不费力地发生，以至于我们经常认为我们的视觉系统在拼凑我们从落在视网膜上的光线看到的东西时所面临的挑战是理所当然的。视觉注意和视觉工作记忆是关键的资源，没有它们，这个过程是不可能的。如此多的信息进入我们的眼睛，如果视觉系统试图分析它们，它将一事无成。注意力和记忆通过只处理和存储相关信息来防止这种信息溢出。但注意力和记忆力如何准确地知道世界上哪些部分是相关的呢？部分答案是，它们对视觉体验中的重要单位进行操作，而认知科学的一个中心项目是确定注意力和记忆选择的单位是什么。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，注意力和记忆是通过限制对象表征来运作的。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，通常将绑定对象与空间中未绑定的特征和位置进行对比。这忽略了现实世界经验中对象的内在动态性。这项拟议的研究试图扩展我们对作为对象意味着什么的概念，包括一个重要的事实，即对象在运动、遮挡和外观变化的情况下，随着时间的推移保持其身份。因此，提出的研究探索了支持持久对象表征的构建和维护的规则和机制。此外，拟议的实验通过关注对象表征对注意力和记忆的影响来探索持久对象表征。这反映了一种描述这些资源的新方式。这项拟议中的项目没有就注意力和记忆的潜在性质提出独立的问题，而是从一个统一的角度审视了这两种关键资源。因此，这个项目的一个中心目标是证明持久对象的表示构成了认知的基本词汇的一部分，最终指导我们如何关注世界，如何记忆它，甚至我们如何推理。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(例如ADHD、阿尔茨海默病)产生影响。这些结果还将对信息的有效提供产生影响，特别是在为残疾人口设计干预措施和为认知要求高的情况(例如空中交通管制)设计接口方面。