Visual attention, memory, and performance across space and time

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How do we learn from our mistakes? How does practice improve performance? How do we become experts? My students and I study cognitive and attentional control and the brain processes underlying the changes that occur as a novice becomes an expert, particularly the experience dependent changes to cognitive, attentional, and memory processes. We study neural events by measuring scalp potentials from a high density array of electrodes which detect millisecond resolution voltage changes generated by neurons. The high temporal resolution of event-related potentials (ERP) allows us to ask specific questions about neural changes related to practice and learning. Of particular interest is how performance is monitored during practice, how errors are detected, and how behaviour is altered in response to errors. Action video game players who play games for long periods of time over many years develop particular visual spatial skills that can be operationally defined and measured in the laboratory. Most published work on video game players focuses on the social aspects of game playing, and only recently have people started studying the cognitive and attentional changes that gamers experience. We study video game players to understand how their expertise develops and how it generalizes to performance on other tasks. A domain in which we are all experts is face recognition. Most face recognition research focuses on perception, identity, and visual memory. Fewer studies look specifically at associated semantic information, yet the face identification that we experience every day involves retrieval of person-specific information. We are studying alterations in behaviour and brain correlates of face processing as knowledge about a person is acquired. Our goal is the exploration of cognitive and attentional control mechanisms, experience dependent changes in attention and memory, and development of expertise. Loss of control is debilitating as observed in disorders such as attention deficit, autism, depression, and addiction. Our results will help improve models of cognitive and attentional control, and help to develop cognitive remediation strategies for brain damage or disease, and declines in normal aging.