Top-down and Bottom-up Control of Visual Attention: Evidence from ERPs and Eye Tracking

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 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Visual attention is imperative for day-to-day functioning. However, some basic questions about the nature of visual attention remain unresolved. There is currently a heated debate about how visual attention is involuntarily guided. Stimulus-driven theories propose that salient stimuli can automatically "capture" visual sTo move forward, some reconciliation between these two opposing accounts is urgently needed. The proposed research will test a new hybrid suppression account of attention capture, which posits that "attend-to-me" signals produced by salient information are suppressed early in visual processing. This top- down suppression signal can be indexed by the PD ERP component. In the proposed experiments, we test the relationship between the presence of behavioral capture effects and top-down suppression. The key prediction is that even when the behavioral capture effects are absent, we should still find a PD event-related potential (ERP) component to salient item. If successful, this hybrid model could resolve a twenty year debate on the nature of visual distraction. The proposed fellowship has several training goals. As a postdoctoral scholar, the applicant would receive training in advanced ERP and eyetracking techniques. The applicant would also gain the valuable opportunity to become a member of the UC Davis research community, which is internationally-renowned for its groundbreaking collaborative research in cognitive neuroscience. This fellowship is vital for the long-term career development of the applicant, who seeks to develop an independent research program that combines neuroimaging and behavioral techniques to study selective visual attention and high-order visual functioning.