Persisting Objects and the Nature of Attention and Memory

描述（由申请人提供）：我们睁开眼睛，我们立即感知到一个丰富而稳定的世界。这种情况发生得如此轻松，以至于我们经常认为我们的视觉系统在拼凑我们从落在视网膜上的光线中看到的东西时所面临的挑战是理所当然的。视觉注意力和视觉工作记忆是至关重要的资源，没有它们，这个过程就不可能完成。如此多的信息进入我们的眼睛，视觉系统将无处不在，如果它试图分析这一切。注意力和记忆力通过只处理和存储相关信息来防止这种信息溢出。但是，注意力和记忆如何准确地知道世界的哪些部分是相关的呢？部分原因在于，它们在视觉体验中的重要单位上运作，而认知科学的一个核心项目就是确定注意力和记忆选择的单位是什么。这个重要的问题已经得到了大量的研究，目前的证据表明，至少在某些情况下，注意力和记忆是在绑定对象表征上运行的。它们是基于对象的。然而，大多数研究都集中在对象的静态性质上，通常将绑定对象与空间中的未绑定特征和位置进行对比。这忽略了现实世界经验中对象的内在动态性质。拟议的研究旨在扩大我们对物体含义的概念，包括物体随着时间的推移保持其身份的重要事实，尽管运动，遮挡和外观变化。因此，拟议的研究探索的规则和机制，支持持久的对象表示的建设和维护。此外，所提出的实验探索持久的对象表征，专注于其后果的注意力和记忆。这反映了一种新的方式来描述这些资源。该项目不是对注意力和记忆的基本性质提出独立的问题，而是从统一的角度看待这两种关键资源。因此，这个项目的一个中心目标是证明，持久物体的表征构成了认知的一部分基础词汇，最终指导我们如何关注世界，如何记住它，甚至如何推理。这些实验的结果将对我们理解注意力和记忆力等基本资源受损的疾病产生影响（例如ADHD、阿尔茨海默病）。这些结果也将有影响的信息的有效呈现，特别是在设计的干预措施受损的人群和在设计的接口认知要求的情况下（如空中交通管制）。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): We open our eyes and we instantly perceive a rich and stable world. This happens so effortlessly that we often take for granted the challenges that our visual systems face in piecing together what we see from the light that lands on our retinas. Visual attention and visual working memory are crucial resources without which this process would be impossible. So much information enters our eyes that the visual system would get nowhere if it tried to analyze it all. Attention and memory preclude this kind of information overflow by processing and storing only relevant information. But how do attention and memory know exactly which bits of the world are the relevant ones? Part of the answer is that they operate over important units in visual experience, and a central project in cognitive science is to determine what are the units that attention and memory select. This important question has received a significant amount of research, and current evidence suggests that, at least in some situations, attention and memory operate over bound object representations. They are object-based. However, most research has focused on the static nature of objects, typically contrasting bound objects with unbound features and locations in space. This neglects the intrinsically dynamic nature of objects in real-world experience. The proposed research seeks to expand our conception of what it means to be an object to include the important fact that objects maintain their identities over time despite motion, occlusion, and changes in appearance. Thus the proposed research explores the rules and mechanisms that support the construction and maintenance of persisting object representations. Moreover, the proposed experiments explore persisting object representations by focusing on their consequences for attention and memory. This reflects a new way of characterizing these resources. Rather than asking independent questions about the underlying nature of attention and memory, the proposed project looks at both of these crucial resources from a unifying perspective. Thus a central aim of this project is to demonstrate that representations of persisting objects comprise a piece of the underlying vocabulary of cognition, ultimately guiding how we attend to the world, how we remember it, and even how we reason about it. The results of these experiments will have implications for our understanding of disorders where basic resources such as attention and memory are impaired (e.g. ADHD, Alzheimer's disease). These results will also have implications for the effective presentation of information, especially in the design of interventions for impaired populations and in the design of interfaces for cognitively demanding situations (e.g. air-traffic control).