Neural underpinnings of attention in the real world: Insights from co-registration of eye movements and EEG

视觉注意力在许多对美国人日常生活有重要影响的任务中起着重要作用。两个主要任务是视觉搜索（例如，识别医学图像中的癌症迹象，或TSA行李扫描中的武器）和阅读文本（例如，在课堂内外学习）。眼球运动在这两项任务中都起着关键作用，但大多数认知神经科学方法（例如，脑电描记术; EEG）要求研究参与者不要移动眼睛，因为这样做会在神经测量中产生伪影，这使得感兴趣的大脑过程更难研究。然而，当眼球运动受到限制时，这些神经科学研究中的推论在某种程度上与正在研究的现象无关。新的分析技术可能使这些领域超越简化的实验室范式，但这种转变需要显着的技术和分析的进步。长期目标是为未来的研究应用创建“最佳实践”和框架的文档，以促进使用眼动跟踪和脑电图方法相结合的最佳工作。这些指南还应促进研究的可靠性和可重复性，并允许更好地整合跨科学领域的理论见解。本次研讨会的目标是汇集来自不同科学领域的领先专家，以解决整合眼动追踪和脑电图方法的方法和概念挑战。主要成果将是促进这些领域对日常生活的影响。例如，更好地理解TSA筛查人员为什么对图像进行错误分类可以导致更好地检测真实的威胁，同时减少筛查人员偏见对边缘化个体的负面影响，并且更好地理解眼球运动行为如何与阅读期间的潜在神经处理相关，可以导致更快、更容易和更少侵入性地检测阅读障碍，例如阅读障碍。该研讨会将促进改善教学，培训和学习，汇集研究人员在几个职业阶段（从研究生到高级研究人员）具有不同的背景和视觉认知的不同领域，讨论在这些领域整合方法的好处和挑战。研讨会的形式包括邀请演讲、小组讨论、海报展示和头脑风暴“推销”会议，旨在以跨越学科界限的方式在初级和高级研究人员之间产生交流。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

Visual attention plays a fundamental role in many tasks that have important consequences for the daily lives of Americans. Two primary tasks are visual search (e.g., identifying signs of cancer in medical images, or weapons in TSA baggage scans) and reading text (e.g., learning inside and outside of the classroom). Eye movements play a critical role in both tasks, but most cognitive neuroscience methods (e.g., electroencephalography; EEG) require research participants to refrain from moving the eyes because doing so produces artifacts in the neural measurements, which make the brain processes of interest harder to study. However, when eye movements are restricted, the inferences made in these neuroscience studies are somewhat removed from the phenomena being studied. New analytic techniques may allow these fields to move beyond simplified laboratory paradigms but this transition requires significant technological and analytic advances. The long-term goal is to create documentation of “best practices” and frameworks for future research applications that promote the best work using a combination of eye tracking and electroencephalography methods. Such guidelines should also foster reliability and reproducibility of studies and allow better integration of theoretical insights across scientific domains.The goal of this workshop is to bring together leading experts from different scientific fields to address the methodological and conceptual challenges of integrating eye tracking and electroencephalography methods. The primary outcome will be to advance the impact of these fields on the lives of everyday people. As examples, better understanding of why TSA screeners misclassify images can lead to better detection of real threats while reducing the negative impact of screener bias on marginalized individuals and better understanding of how eye movement behavior relates to underlying neural processing during reading can lead to faster, easier, and less-invasive detection of reading disorders such as dyslexia. The workshop will promote improved teaching, training, and learning by bringing together researchers at several career stages (from graduate students to senior researchers) with diverse backgrounds and in different domains of visual cognition to discuss the benefits and challenges of integrating methodological approaches in these domains. The workshop format, which includes invited talks, small-group panels, poster sessions, and brainstorming 'pitch' sessions, is specifically designed to engender cross-talk between junior and senior researchers in a way that spans disciplinary boundaries.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.