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地点。我们在日常工作中需要这种能力，从宴会前数一套椅子到在高峰时间驾驭复杂的交通。我们在学校或工作中也需要这种能力，当我们遵循复杂的图表布局或在图表中找出值之间的差异时。在这些类型的任务中，我们分散注意力的能力有一个惊人的限制，而且我们通常一次只能处理几个地点。这种限制的无处不在导致它被接受为视觉处理的基本限制，但我们对其发生的原因知之甚少。在美国国家科学基金会职业奖的支持下，西北大学的弗兰科内里博士将测试这些限制是否源于世界各地出席地点的认知“地图”中的瓶颈。理解注意力分散的局限性可能会导致我们在图形和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的洞察力。这也可能有助于更好地理解自闭症患者的视觉加工差异，因为自闭症患者在分散注意力方面存在更大困难。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”系列以及在芝加哥地区的其他外联讲座向公众进行外联；(2)课程开发；(3)向从高中到博士后水平的学生和研究人员提供建议；(4)通过向西北大学和研究人员实验室招募代表不足的群体，向代表性不足的群体进行外联，包括为来自代表性不足的背景的当地学生提供暑期奖学金；以及(5)与包括教育和信息可视化在内的相关学科进行协作外联。

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.