Attention and the Representation of Scenes and Objects

想象一下，在一条满是行人、其他汽车、交通标志和信号以及潜在道路危险的忙碌街上开车。 为了在这条街上安全驾驶，一个人必须不断地意识到所有这些刺激，准备好对任何变化做出反应。 如果一个人能够同时保持对所有这些信息的心理表征，那么处理这种复杂性就相对简单了。 然而，最近的证据表明，在“心灵之眼”中对世界的心理表征并不像世界本身那样详细。 例如，人们通常无法注意到周围环境的巨大变化，这导致一些人认为大部分视觉环境在心灵的眼中并不持久。 为什么我们会记住周围环境的某些方面，而不是其他方面？ 关键似乎在于被称为视觉注意力的心灵之眼的“焦点”：我们给予特别注意的周围环境的那些方面更有可能在头脑中持续存在。 因此，要了解世界在头脑中的持续表现，有必要研究影响心灵之眼聚焦的因素。在美国国家科学基金会的支持下，罗伯特·戈登博士将研究心灵之眼如何发展和维持头脑中有意义的场景和物体。 戈登博士结合了三种对感知最早时刻敏感的方法，并认为以前的研究没有使用过这种方法。 戈登博士实验的参与者观看描绘熟悉环境的全色场景。 在一些实验中，将评估他们的注意力分布，以确定决定人们在观看有意义的场景时注意力集中的因素。 在其他实验中，将研究注意力选择对这些场景表征的影响。 总之，实验结果将有助于揭示人们感知和理解视觉信息的过程。 更广泛的影响包括对用户必须快速提取视觉信息的显示器设计的影响。 此外，该项目将通过支持为研究做出贡献的研究生和本科生来整合研究和教育目标。

Imagine driving down a busy street full of pedestrians, other cars, traffic signs and signals, and potential road hazards. In order to drive safely down this street, one must be continuously aware of all of these stimuli, ready to react to any changes. Dealing with this complexity would be relatively straightforward if one were able to maintain a mental representation of all of this information at once. Recent evidence, however, suggests that mental representations of the world in the "mind's eye" are not nearly as detailed as the world itself. For example, people routinely fail to notice large changes in their surroundings, leading some to suggest that much of the visual environment is not sustained in the mind's eye. Why do we keep some aspects of our surroundings in mind and not others? The key appears to lie in the "focus" of the mind's eye called visual attention: those aspects of our surroundings that we give particular attention to are more likely to be sustained in mind. To understand the sustained representation of the world in the mind, therefore, it is necessary to examine the factors that influence focus of the mind's eye.With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Robert Gordon will examine how the mind's eye develops and sustains meaningful scenes and objects within the mind. Dr. Gordon combines three approaches that are sensitive to the very earliest moments of perception and argues that previous studies have not used such approaches. Participants in Dr. Gordon's experiments view full-color scenes depicting familiar environments. In some experiments, the distribution of their attention will be assessed in order to identify the factors that determine where people pay attention while viewing meaningful scenes. In other experiments, the consequences of attentional selection for the representation of such scenes will be investigated. Together, the results of the experiments will help reveal the processes that allow people to perceive and comprehend visual information. Broader impacts include implications for the design of displays in which users must rapidly extract visual information. Moreover, the project will integrate research and educational goals by supporting graduate and undergraduate students who contribute to the research.