CAREER: Individuation in Visual Cognition

许多视觉任务要求我们同时将注意力分散到多个位置。 我们需要这种能力来完成日常任务，从晚宴前数椅子到在交通高峰期导航复杂的交通。 我们在学校或工作中也需要这种能力，当遵循图表的复杂布局或查找图表中值之间的差异时。 在这类任务中，我们分散注意力的能力有一个令人惊讶的限制，我们通常只能同时处理几个位置。 这种限制的普遍存在导致它被接受为视觉处理的基本限制，但我们对它为什么会发生却知之甚少。 在NSF CAREER奖的支持下，西北大学的Franconeri博士将测试这些限制是否源于世界上参加地点的认知“地图”中的瓶颈。 理解分散注意力的局限性可能会导致我们在图表中组织信息的方式发生重要变化，并可能为我们理解儿童如何学习数数提供重要见解。 它也可能导致更好地理解自闭症人群的视觉处理差异，他们在分散注意力方面有更大的困难。 这项研究将与一项教育计划相结合，该计划包括：（1）通过设计“大脑周”系列以及芝加哥地区的其他外联讲座，向公众推广;（2）课程开发;（3）为从高中到博士后的学生和研究人员提供咨询;（4）通过西北大学和研究者实验室的招聘来接触代表性不足的群体，包括为来自代表性不足背景的当地学生提供暑期奖学金，以及（5）与相关学科的合作推广，包括教育和信息可视化。

Many visual tasks require that we divide attention across multiple locations at once. We need this ability for everyday tasks, from counting a set of chairs before a dinner party to navigating complex traffic during rush hour. We also need this ability at school or at work, when following the complex layout of a diagram or finding differences among values within graphs. In these kinds of tasks there is a surprising limit to our ability to split our attention and we can typically deal with only a few locations at once. The ubiquity of this limitation has led to its acceptance as a fundamental limit on visual processing, yet we have little understanding of why it happens. With the support of an NSF CAREER Award, Dr. Franconeri, Northwestern University, will test the possibility that these limits stem from a bottleneck within a cognitive 'map' of attended locations in the world. Understanding the limits of divided attention could lead to important changes in the ways that we organize information in graphs and diagrams and may offer critical insight into our understanding of how children learn to count. It may also lead to better understanding of visual processing differences in autistic populations, who have greater difficulty dividing their attention. This research will be integrated with an education plan that includes (1) outreach to the general public through the design of a "Brain Week" series as well as other outreach talks in the Chicago area, (2) curriculum development, (3) advising of students and researchers from high school to postdoctoral levels, (4) outreach to underrepresented groups via recruitment to both Northwestern and the investigator's laboratory, including a summer fellowship for a local student from an under-represented background, and (5) collaborative outreach to related disciplines including education and information visualization.