Reflexive and controlled processes in attention

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At any given moment in time there is considerably more visual information available in the environment than we can efficiently deal with. From the visual information impinging on our retinae, the light sensitive tissue at the back of our eyes, our brain selects only a subset to reach conscious awareness. One of the major selection processes is happening in the attentional system which will highlight certain information in the environment while at the same time suppressing the rest. The main questions we will be addressing over the next five years are concerned with this initial selection process: What are the mechanisms behind it? What are the limitations and how flexible is the process? Can typically hard-wired selection processes be overwritten by an individual's goals? Can the rules for attentional selection be learned implicitly and is this as effective as conscious awareness of rules? How do attentional processes interact with other cognitive faculties such as working memory (the ability to maintain information online after it has been removed from view)? Do both faculties show the same capacity limits? How do they interfere with each other when one is taxed? Furthermore, we will show how attentional and working memory processes are implemented in the brain and to what extent they share the same neural resources. This in turn will advance our understanding of some cognitive disorders observed after brain damage.