Updating of attentional topography following eye movements

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Visual scenes are often cluttered, and we cannot process every detail. Attention and eye movements to relevant objects or locations can speed reactions to important events. Attention and eye movements are often tightly coupled, but what if we attend to one location, while moving our eyes to other parts of a scene? Our image of the world shifts on the retina with each eye movement. What, then, happens to our internal representation of the attended location? Preliminary results indicate that attentional benefits shift with each eye movement, leaving residual attentional benefits at task-irrelevant locations that take 100-200ms to decay. Spatial attention thus appears to be maintained in retinotopic (eye-centered) coordinates immediately after a saccade, even when the task is to hold the spatiotopic (world-centered) coordinates in working memory. This proposal aims to further investigate this preliminary effect to more fully elucidate the updating of attentional topography that takes place following an eye movement. Aim 1 will probe longer time intervals to see if expectation and context influence these timecourses. Aim 1 will also probe the spatial extent of this effect. Aim 2 will investigate shifts in attentional topography under different task demands, including a task in which the retinotopic coordinates are behaviorally relevant to hold in memory, a task utilizing smooth pursuit eye movements instead of saccades, and a task in which the task-relevant location represents the target of a memory-guided saccade. The proposed research thus investigates how a number of cognitive and behavioral systems interact, specifically those involving attention, working memory, and eye movements. It uses a multidisciplinary approach designed to explore the behavioral implications, neural underpinnings, and theoretical models of these interactions. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE Consistent with the NIMH mission, the proposal aims to advance basic research in understanding how a normally functioning brain can integrate top-down cognitive motivation (in the form of attention or working memory demands) with bottom-up changes in visual stimulation. Given that both cognitive and oculomotor deficits are present in a variety of mental illnesses, it is possible that the ability to sustain attention across eye movements may function abnormally in such diseases as ADHD, autism, and schizophrenia. To apply these findings to clinical populations, however, the basic research outlined in the proposal is necessary to more fully understand interactions between eye movements and cognition in normally functioning adults.