Human attention: From brain structures to group interactions.

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Attention is a multifaceted cognitive ability that fuels our perceptions, actions, decisions, and complex behaviors. In my group, we study the behavioral and neural systems that enable this intricate capacity. ******Building on the classically-conceived notion of attention as a sensory tuning function, recent evidence, including our work, suggests that attention may be more comprehensively conceptualized as a complex ability that fluctuates with the type of incoming information, context within which that information is presented, and individual variables. The work outlined in this proposal will assess this dynamics. Objective 1 is to examine the modulating effects of stimuli, learning, and motivation. Objective 2 is to investigate how variability in attention between and within individuals influences long-term behavioral and functional outcomes. Finally, driven by an exciting new notion that our cognitions, including attentional operations, are modulated by the presence of other people, the studies in Objective 3 will examine how fundamental attentional functions (e.g., reflexive and voluntary attention) operate in multi-person situations, capturing the expressions of the basic attentional mechanisms in complex interactive contexts irrespective of the social aspects of those exchanges.******The anticipated significance of this work is threefold. One, our approaches and results will contribute to the creation of an expanded framework for studying attention across multiple levels of analysis - from brain mechanisms to multi-agent conditions. Two, they will facilitate theoretical integration of the prevailing knowledge of attention as a tuning function with the emerging notion of attention as a complex ability. Finally, the proposed novel methods, approaches, and analyses will enable us to continue to attract, train, and educate HQP at the highest level.**