Visual Perception and Attention

我的实验室研究人类视觉感知、社会情绪处理和动作运动学之间的接口。这些方法是行为学(心理物理学、眼球跟踪、肢体运动、自我报告、第三人称观察、问卷调查)，并受到生理学(电生理学、成像)和神经心理学(脑损伤、疾病)理论的强烈影响。作为UBC视觉实验室正在进行的项目的例子，简要概述了两个具有代表性的研究路线。我们小组最近的一个令人兴奋的发现是，当人类观察者试图预测演员的下一步动作时，他们对演员的注意力控制状态很敏感。这种敏感性的一个结果是，当演员自由选择移动时，观察者能够更好地预测演员的下一步动作，而不是在外部力量的指导下。我们的结论是，人类对与移情有关的内隐运动学过程很敏感，社会知觉涉及对他人注意状态的预测性建模。这项拟议的工作现在更详细地研究了个体接收的运动学信号是如何作为他们与他人共鸣的能力的函数而不同的。这一发现的核心是发展了一种实验方法，这种方法将意识内容从进行视觉引导的指向运动所需的方向中分离出来(Enns等人，2017年，大脑研究进展)。这项拟议的研究将把这一方法论扩展到研究两个视觉系统(背侧和腹侧)是如何由分离的选择机制引导的。简而言之，这项工作是为了摆脱我们领域中的偏见，调用一个单一的注意网络；相反，它论证了在两个视觉流中，选择性的机制就像它们各自形成的表征一样不同。

My lab studies the interface between human visual perception, social-emotional processing, and action kinematics. The methods are behavioral (psychophysics, eye tracking, limb movement, self-report, third-person observation, questionnaire) and are strongly informed by theories based on physiology (electrophysiology, imaging) and neuropsychology (brain injury, disease). Two representative lines of research are outlined briefly as examples of the projects ongoing in the UBC Vision Lab.An exciting recent discovery from our group is that when human observers are trying to predict the next moves of an actor, they are sensitive to the attentional control state of the actor. One consequence of this sensitivity is that observers are better able to predict the actor's next moves when the actor is choosing freely to move than when they are being directed by an external force. We call this the “choice advantage” in person perception (Pesquita et al., 2016 PNAS) and have shown that (a) it is visible in the very early kinematics of the actor, (b) it is outside the conscious awareness of the observer, (c) the kinematic signal is distributed over the torso and limbs of the actor, and (d) that sensitivity to the signal is correlated with the overall social aptitude of the observer. We conclude that humans are sensitive to an implicit kinematic process linked to empathy and that social perception involves the predictive modeling of others' attentional states. The proposed work now examines in greater detail how the kinematic signals received by individuals differs as a function of their ability to empathize with others. The proposed work also examines how sensitivity to an actor's attentional state influences the observer's ability to engage in collaborative tasks with the actor.A second important discovery of the past round of funding is that the so-called “autopilot” of the dorsal visual stream (i.e., the circuitry that enables us to press an elevator button while moving, to catch a ball with our hands, to pass a baton to a runner in a relay) seems to operate independently from the ventral visual stream circuitry that informs us about the emotional meaning of the objects we are reaching for (e.g., a spider crawling on a pen). Central to this discovery was the development of an experimental method that disentangled the contents of consciousness from the directions needed to make a visually guided pointing movement (Enns et al., 2017, Progress in Brain Research). The proposed research will extend this methodology to study of how the two visual systems (dorsal and ventral) are guided by dissociable selective mechanisms. In short, this work is an effort to break away from the bias in our field to invoke a monolithic attentional network; arguing instead that the mechanisms of selectivity are as different in the two visual streams as are the representations that are formed by each of them.