How do concepts and perceptual simulations affect visual attention

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The ability to selectively attend to portions of the visual field, thus prioritizing specific visual information for subsequent perceptual and cognitive processing, is critical for humans to successfully interact with our complex visual environments. Traditionally, attentional selection was thought to be accomplished either through exogenous shifts of attention, where an external event (e.g., onset of a cue) would reflexively "pull" attention to a peripheral location, or through endogenous shifts of attention, where attention would be volitionally "pushed" to a peripheral location. Recent research has suggested, however, that attention orienting may also be accomplished through exposure to cues that activate internal spatial representations, such as object words (e.g., hat, boot) or abstract concepts (e.g., God, Devil). For example, work from my laboratory has shown that some abstract concepts that have spatial metaphors generate shifts of attention that facilitate detection of targets at spatially compatible locations (Chasteen et al., 2010). Other research, however, has shown that responses to targets are inhibited when they appear at a location typically associated with an object word (Estes et al., 2008). Drawing on Perceptual Symbols Theory (PST; Barsalou, 1999), Estes et al. suggest that not only do object words orient attention to associated spatial locations, but they also trigger perceptual simulations of the objects which activate the neural mechanisms related to the actual perception of those objects. Thus, identification of targets at the locations associated with the objects is slowed because inhibition of the simulated objects must occur before target identification can be completed. The purpose of the proposed research is to determine when perceptual simulations of objects and concepts facilitate or inhibit processing of targets at associated spatial locations. To accomplish this, I propose two inter-related programs of research in which I will determine how a) the nature of target processing (identification vs. detection) and b) the nature of the stimuli (i.e., degree of featural overlap between objects or concepts and a target stimulus) tip the balance between facilitation and inhibition.