The dual nature of visual cognition

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The research in the current proposal revolves around one of the fundamental and pervasive problems humans must overcome; there is considerably more information in our visual field than we can successfully process at any given moment.  To overcome this problem, the attention system makes an initial, rapid evaluation of the information in the visual field and then the working memory system facilitates the conscious report of what we have seen.  The goal of this research is to better understand the attention system and how it interacts with the working memory system.  To do so, we will examine high temporal resolution brain imaging measurements available from electroencephalogram (EEG) equipment in two carefully constructed sets of experiments.  One set of experiments will provide insights into the neural processes that are involved in allocating attention to various regions of the visual field.  A second set of experiments will specifically examine the role that working memory processes have on the allocation of attention.  Together, these two related sets of experiments will provide important information as to how humans obtain and make sense of the visual information from their environment.