CAREER: Attentional Inhibition to Selected-and-Rejected Visual Features and Categories

想象一下，在一群男性朋友中寻找一位女性朋友。这次你能多成功地找到你的女性朋友，一定程度上决定了你将来在同样的任务中能有多成功。该研究将探讨感知者先前的视觉经验如何影响感知者关注并最终看到世界的后续过程。这项研究建立在这样一个发现的基础上：通过在一群男性（干扰物）中寻找女性（目标），视觉注意力系统会产生一种偏见，不去关注男性的脸。这种对干扰物的抑制性偏见会持续一段时间，从而影响感知者对未来任何包含男性面孔的场景或与干扰物相同类别的任何刺激的关注。拟议的研究将使用各种任务来检查这种偏差及其在视觉处理中的后果，例如，偏差是否存在于空间搜索（寻找物体）和时间搜索（在一系列简要呈现的物体中寻找物体的外观）的背景下。该研究项目开始解决一个尚未得到太多研究关注的基本问题，即我们先前的视觉经验如何影响我们在随后的视觉信息处理中看待场景的位置、内容和方式。研究者致力于在这个CAREER项目中整合研究和培训活动，利用这个项目作为功能性神经影像学的培训机会，研究大脑机制参与产生这些基于经验的注意偏差。此外，研究者将在本科和研究生阶段整合研究和教育活动，积极让学生参与项目，并开发课程，为学生提供独立研究的工具和理论知识。最后，该项目还将为研究人类的注意力缺陷和抑制控制缺陷打开大门，如注意力缺陷障碍、强迫症、抑郁症、执行控制功能障碍、精神分裂症和痴呆症。作为一名西班牙裔背景的研究人员，研究者在提高少数民族代表性和知名度方面处于独特的地位，特别是在认知心理学方面。

Imagine looking for a female friend of yours in a crowd filled with your male friends. How successful you are at finding your female friend this time around will partly determine how successful you will be in the future at the same task. The proposed research will examine the question of how perceiver's prior visual experience affects subsequent processes in which the perceiver attends to and ultimately sees the world. The research builds on the finding that by looking for a female (target) within a group of males (distractors), the visual attention system creates a bias against attending to male faces. Such an inhibitory bias against distractors persists over time and will consequently affect how the perceiver attends to any future scene that contains male faces or any stimuli within the same category of the distractor. The proposed research will use a variety of tasks to examine such biases and their consequences in visual processing, for example, whether the bias exists in the context of both spatial search (looking for an object) and temporal search (looking for the appearance of an object, within a stream of briefly presented objects).The research project begins to address a fundamental question that has not received much research attention, that is, how our prior visual experience affects where, what and how we will look at a scene in subsequent visual information processing. The investigator is committed to integrating research and training activities in this CAREER project by using the project as a training opportunity in functional neuroimaging to study the brain mechanisms involved in creating these experience-based biases of attention. Further, the investigator will integrate research and education activities at the undergraduate and graduate levels, by actively involving students in the projects and by developing courses that will provide students with the tools and the theoretical knowledge for independent research. Finally, the project will also open the door to study attention-based deficits in humans and deficits in inhibitory control, such as Attention Deficit Disorders, Obsessive Compulsive Disorders, Depression, Executive Control Function Impairments, Schizophrenia and Dementia. As a researcher of Hispanic background, the investigator is in a unique position to improve minority representation and visibility in science in general and cognitive psychology in particular.