The Cognitive Neuroscience of Selective Attention in Dynamic Behavioral and Psychological Contexts

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From identifying the item we're looking for in the fridge to noticing a traffic signal changing from green to red, how we pay attention to the world is vital for safe, effective navigation through our everyday lives. Not surprisingly then, over the last several decades much research in cognitive neuroscience has centered on understanding how we go about paying attention to the world around us, research that concerns understanding not just how neural systems are organized in the brain, but how these systems map on to the structure of our minds. Towards advancing our basic knowledge of attention, my proposal concerns understanding how our attention to objects and events in the world dynamically changes over time, in response to what we're doing and thinking in the course of our on-going, everyday activities––such as walking, shopping, and driving. Specifically, the planned studies involve using EEG-based measures of brain electrical activity to investigate attention in three different dynamic contexts. The first concerns how we use our attention to help guide our physical mobility, or walking. The focus here is on studying older individuals who have problems with falling––a mobility impairment in seniors linked to deficits in attentional capacities. By understanding how attentional capacities are impaired in fallers, we can help understand how we use our attention to guide mobility when everything is working normally. The second attentional context concerns mind wandering, or the natural tendency we all have for our thoughts to drift away from what we're currently doing, such as commonly happens when driving, to focus on other things, like last night's dinner conversation or plans for an upcoming holiday. As work in my lab has shown, we now know that periods of mind wandering dramatically reduce our attention to the outside world. A new set of studies plans to more carefully characterize the breadth and depth of these effects. Finally, the third attentional context concerns psychological factors that can trigger heightened attentional states to objects and events in the outside world––taking ownership over an object, such as when shopping, and being exposed to novel events or experiences, such as when visiting a new country. Here the goal is to examine how these situations can trigger heightened attentional states, and the time course of such effects. My proposal has critical implications both for basic research and for how it can be applied for the benefit of Canadians. In terms of pure science, research on attention has long centered on understanding how it aids the identification and recognition of visual objects. The novelty of the proposal here is investigating the much broader functional role selective visual attention plays in mediating our everyday interactions with the physical environment. In terms of practical significance, the proposal focuses on basic research, but research that has a firm eye towards bridging to the clinical implications involved. What we learn about attentional deficits in fallers can help us to understand how to better treat this widespread problem in seniors. What we learn about mind wandering can help us to understand disorders such as depression and attention deficit disorder, issues that concern our attention to the outside world. And what we learn about attention and object ownership may give new insight into hording behaviors and obsessive/compulsive disorders. But taken together, the research doesn’t just promise to help advance our understanding of basic neurocognitive mechanisms and their potential clinical consequences, but the projects themselves represent an outstanding opportunity for training the next generation of Canadian cognitive neuroscientists.