Scene Structure and Surfaces: Viewing strategies effects on attention, learning, and memory

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Visual search is an integral part of many tasks; while navigating through a city, making a sandwich or fixing a leaky faucet, we search for landmarks, objects, and tools. Traditionally, attentional mechanisms during visual search have been investigated using visual arrays, in which items are equally spaced across an artificial, uniform visual field. My trainees and I study how mechanisms of attentional control operate in more complex, naturalistic environments. We have found that basic theories, developed using artificial arrays, do not easily generalize to the real-world scenes, in part because the scene context provides strong biases and expectations based on knowledge and experience. One way to account for these differences lies in how object and scenes are linked spatially (Castelhano cene, how information is processed and how these processes change over time when expectations are met or violated. Across three projects, we aim to examine how: 1. attention is distributed across the scene and whether processing in irrelevant regions is actively suppressed (Project 1), 2. strategies shift over time (from one of exploiting previous experience and knowledge to one exploring the environment when those expectations are not met) and how they affect learning and memory for scene's information (Project 2) 3. visual search changes in a 3D environment, where the cost-benefit ratio of moment-to-moment decisions change as people walk around (Project 3). The goal of my research program is to develop a more detailed theoretical account of how perceptual information, general world knowledge, and previous experience is combined to allow for efficient and effective visual search within real-world environments. The Surface Guidance Framework, by generating testable hypotheses, enables the development of new concepts, paradigms and a new theoretical understanding of mechanisms of attention and the processing of information in visually complex environments. This proposed work is transformational both for the understanding of basic cognitive processes of real-world scene information and for understanding how these processes combine and change over time. My trainees and I will use this novel theoretical framework as a first step in developing a fuller understanding of cognitive processing in complex, naturalistic environments.