Researcher Starter Grant

这些NSF启动基金将支持一位刚刚完成NSF少数族裔博士后奖学金，目前在伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校担任认知神经科学终身教职的PI一年的研究基础设施。该基金将为PI在英属哥伦比亚大学攻读NSF博士后期间发现的快速恢复现象的拟议项目提供研究支持（NSF奖号0309998）。最初进行的实验在一篇论文中进行了描述，该论文被《心理科学》杂志接受发表，这是该领域领先的同行评审期刊。该项目的重点是快速恢复，这是指人类在中断后恢复搜索比最初开始搜索要好得多的现象。研究人员使用一种被称为中断搜索的范式来研究这种现象。在这个范例中，参与者被展示一个短时间的视觉搜索显示（“看”时间= 100毫秒），与一个空白显示（“等待”时间= 900毫秒）交替。由于任务困难，参与者不能只看一次显示就完成搜索，因此，他们被迫中断搜索行为，直到搜索显示重新出现。在这样的中断条件下，研究人员发现，参与者非常擅长重新开始搜索（通过每次显示重新出现后的快速反应时间来衡量），因此被称为快速恢复（RR）。结果表明，当参与者“迅速恢复”搜索任务时，他们没有事先有意识的知识，也没有对目标身份的任何直觉。因此，研究人员将RR解释为“快速感知”的一个例子，它是由于视觉过程（在搜索过程中起作用）和记忆过程（在中断过程中起作用）之间的相互作用而产生的。该项目的目标是继续研究这一现象，以便更好地理解视觉和记忆在搜索过程中是如何相互作用的，更一般地说，这些系统是如何相互作用的，以提供我们周围世界的稳定感知表征。在这个项目中，我们提出了9个具体的实验来研究RR（不包括可能需要的试点和/或后续研究）。这项提议的工作将推进我们对一个重要的人类日常行为的认识：人类是如何搜索他们的环境的，特别是在他们不得不反复打断他们的搜索行为的情况下（就像我们经常必须做的那样）。其次，它将为我们提供关于两个重要认知系统：记忆和视觉之间相互作用的新见解。研究这些相互作用的本质也将增强我们对涉及这两个系统的各种其他认知现象的理解（例如，变化盲视，无意盲视和上下文线索等）。第三，这一研究是第一个调查“恢复”行为的研究，即重新从事先前中断的任务。虽然大多数关于任务转换的研究文献都发现了从一项任务切换到另一项任务的认知成本，但这是第一次研究显示人类具有回到先前开始的任务的自然能力。首席研究员致力于将研究作为一种教育经验，无论是在本科生还是研究生阶段，并通过在专业会议上的演讲和在同行评审期刊上的出版物来传播研究成果。此外，通过支持这个项目，美国国家科学基金会将支持拉美裔人参与心理学领域。最后，这项工作的广泛意义扩展到研究人类操作员如何与复杂系统交互的应用领域，在这些系统中，他们经常必须同时执行多个任务。这项工作有可能以这样一种方式进行扩展，即可以制定指导方针，从而减轻多任务环境中通常存在的一些认知成本（例如，通过允许操作员快速返回到先前未完成的任务，以便他们可以快速恢复它）。

These NSF Starter Grant Funds will support one year of research infrastructure for a PI who has just completed an NSF Minority Post-Doc Fellowship and is now in a tenure-track position in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign. Funds will provide research support for a proposed project examining the phenomenon of Rapid Resumption, which the PI discovered during his NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of British Columbia (NSF award #0309998). The initial experiments conducted are described in a paper accepted for publication in the journal Psychological Science, a leading peer reviewed journal in the field. The project focuses on Rapid Resumption, which refers to the phenomenon that humans are much better at resuming a search after an interruption, than they are at initially starting the search. The phenomenon is studied using a paradigm that the researchers call interrupted search. In this paradigm, participants are shown a visual search display for a brief period of time ("look" time = 100 ms) in alternation with a blank display ("wait" time = 900 ms). Because of the task difficulty, participants cannot finish the search with just one look at the display and therefore, are forced to interrupt their search behavior until the search display re-appears. Under such interruption conditions, the researchers showed that participants are very good at resuming their search (as measured by very fast reaction times following each display reappearance), thus the name of Rapid Resumption (RR). The results showed that when participants "rapidly resume" the search task, they do so with no previous conscious knowledge nor any intuition about the target identity. Thus, the researchers interpreted RR as a case of "rapid perception" that comes about because of interactions between visual processes (at play during search) and memory processes (at play during the interruptions). The goal of this project is to continue the study of this phenomenon so that a better understanding can be achieved on how vision and memory interact during search, and more generally, how these systems interact to provide a stable perceptual representation of the world around us. In this project, nine specific experiments are proposed to study RR (not including pilot and/or follow-up studies that may be necessary). The proposed work will advance our knowledge of an important everyday human behavior: how is it that humans search their environment, particularly under conditions where they have to repeatedly interrupt their search behavior (as we often must do). Second, it will provide us with new insights regarding the interactions between two important cognitive systems: memory and vision. Studying the nature of these interactions will also enhance our understanding of various other cognitive phenomena where these two systems are involved (e.g., Change Blindness, Inattentional Blindness, and Contextual Cueing among others). Third, this line of research is the first to investigate the act of "resumption", i.e., of reengaging on a previously interrupted task. While most research on the task-switching literature has found cognitive costs to switching from one task to another, this is the first research to show a natural ability for humans to go back to a previously started task. The principal investigator is committed to using research as an educational experience, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels and to disseminate research findings via presentations at professional conferences and publications in peer-reviewed journals. Also, by supporting this project, the NSF will be supporting the participation of Hispanics in the field of psychology. Last, the broader significance of this work extends to applied fields studying how human operators interact with complex systems, in which they often have to perform multiple tasks in tandem. The work has the potential to be extended in such a way that guidelines may be able to be developed that would alleviate some of the cognitive costs usually present in multi-task environments (for example, by allowing operators to quickly return to a previously unfinished task, so that they may rapidly resume it).