How do independent attentional mechanisms coordinate information processing across the visual system?

我们生活的环境包含了远远超过我们有限的大脑所能处理的视觉信息。虽然这意味着有时我们看不到我们世界的一部分（正如流行的看不见的大猩猩：http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/videos.html所证明的那样），但我们仍然可以利用这些环境信息以令人惊讶的复杂方式指导我们的行为，比如在开车的时候。我们如何理解压倒性的环境来成功地引导行为？我们成功的关键是专注。我们的大脑使用许多注意力机制来塑造我们如何根据当前目标处理信息。通过这种方式，注意力通过关注重要信息而忽略其他信息来简化信息处理。例如，当在人群中寻找穿着红色毛衣的朋友时，注意力会优先处理红色的东西，而不是非红色的东西。事实上，有许多注意机制允许我们以不同的方式优先处理视觉处理。对于特征（如特定的颜色或形状）、空间位置（如你视野中的特定区域）和类别（如面孔或场景）等等，存在优先排序机制。虽然过去的研究已经单独研究了这些注意机制，以确定它们的基本特性和局限性，但我的研究计划将研究这些单独的机制如何协调，以连贯的方式指导整个视觉系统的信息处理。这种层次的描述对于理解人类行为的注意力约束至关重要。虽然我们有时会因为缺乏注意力而犯错误，但我们的错误也经常是因为注意到错误的信息。例如，在加拿大，机动车碰撞的社会成本高达数百亿美元（加拿大运输部，2011年），80%的机动车碰撞是驾驶员注意力不集中造成的（NHSTA， 2010年）。通过研究对视觉处理的控制如何在注意机制之间协调和传递，本研究项目将为优化不同领域的行为表现提供重要指导，包括驾驶汽车、机场行李检查和诊断医学图像上的异常检测等应用设置。

We live in environments that contain far more visual information than our finite brains can process. While this means that sometimes we fail to see parts of our world (as demonstrated by the popular invisible gorilla: http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/videos.html), we can nevertheless use this environmental information to guide our behaviour in amazingly complex ways, such as when driving a car. How do we make sense of overwhelming environments to successfully guide behaviour?The key to our success is attention. Our brains use of a number of attentional mechanisms that shape how we process information based on our current goals. In this way, attention simplifies information processing by focussing on the important information, and ignoring the rest. For example, when searching for a friend in a crowd wearing a red sweater, attention will prioritize processing of red things, over non-red things. Indeed, there are numerous attentional mechanisms that allow us to prioritize visual processing in different ways. There are mechanisms for prioritizing features (e.g., specific colours or shapes), spatial locations (e.g., specific regions in your visual field), and categories (e.g., faces or scenes), among many others. While past research has studied each of these attentional mechanisms in isolation to identify their basic properties and limitations, my research program will investigate how these individual mechanisms coordinate to guide information processing in a coherent manner across the visual system. This level of description is critical for understanding the attentional constraints on human behaviour. While we sometimes make mistakes due to a lack of attention, our mistakes also frequently result from attending to the wrong information. For example, in Canada, motor vehicle collisions have social costs measured in the tens of billions of dollars (Transport Canada, 2011), and 80% of motor vehicle collisions have driver inattention as a contributing factor (NHSTA, 2010). By studying how control over visual processing is coordinated and passed between attentional mechanisms, the present research program will provide an important guide in optimizing behavioural performance across diverse domains, including applied settings such as driving a car, screening luggage at airports, and detecting anomalies on diagnostic medical images.