Aspects of Attention and Adaptive Memory

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This proposal continues my study of the systems responsible for attention and those responsible for higher-level processing such as the recognition of meaning and "object-ness," via memory retrieval.  This grant application focuses on the interaction from two directions.  First, how does the allocation of attention (or lack thereof) affect our ability to process meaning?  Although the longstanding view has been that recognizing the meaning of many stimuli (e.g., words) is automatic, and can be accomplished in the absence of attention, more recent work is challenging this view.  I will continue to ask whether it is necessary for a stimulus to be the focus of attention in order for us to be able to apprehend its identity and evaluate it, and I will also examine whether there are particular cases in which much of this information can be uncovered without the application of focal attention. The second, and largely neglected, issue is whether processes involved in the computation of meaning and object recognition have consequences for the operation of attention. In other words, does the scope and activation of attention depend on the products of processing? Is it possible to affect how attention is attracted to, or held at, a location or object by manipulating factors such as the semantic saliency of the stimulus?  This question becomes particularly pertinent when considering the fact that our perceptual systems evolved in response to selective pressures in the environment.  For example, it is plausible that an object or individual carrying some indication of threat might affect our attentional systems such that attention is "held" to process that similes fully until a decision can be made about the proper action to take.  An important and novel focus of this work, then will be to consider the evolutionary adaptations that shaped the attentional systems that we see at work today.   Finally, work in my lab and others has shown that there are considerable individual differences in what were previously conceived to be "standard" attentional phenomena.  My current plan is to continue to examine each of the paradigms that I and others use (e.g., selection, exogenous and endogenous cueing, priming, dual-task, visual search) in order to establish the generality and stability of common attentional effects.   These questions will be investigated in the context of well-established paradigms and procedures.  My contribution is to take these established paradigms and combine them in novel ways to ask questions that have not been previously addressed.  Pilot work in these areas suggests that the answers to these questions will force us to re-evaluate the underpinnings of a number of current theoretical accounts of the effects of attention on higher level processes, and vice versa.