CAREER: Attentional Inhibition to Selected-and-Rejected Visual Features and Categories

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

Imagine looking for a female friend of yours in a crowd filled with your male friends. How successful you are at finding your female friend this time around will partly determine how successful you will be in the future at the same task. The proposed research will examine the question of how perceiver's prior visual experience affects subsequent processes in which the perceiver attends to and ultimately sees the world. The research builds on the finding that by looking for a female (target) within a group of males (distractors), the visual attention system creates a bias against attending to male faces. Such an inhibitory bias against distractors persists over time and will consequently affect how the perceiver attends to any future scene that contains male faces or any stimuli within the same category of the distractor. The proposed research will use a variety of tasks to examine such biases and their consequences in visual processing, for example, whether the bias exists in the context of both spatial search (looking for an object) and temporal search (looking for the appearance of an object, within a stream of briefly presented objects). The research project begins to address a fundamental question that has not received much research attention, that is, how our prior visual experience affects where, what and how we will look at a scene in subsequent visual information processing. The investigator is committed to integrating research and training activities in this CAREER project by using the project as a training opportunity in functional neuroimaging to study the brain mechanisms involved in creating these experience-based biases of attention. Further, the investigator will integrate research and education activities at the undergraduate and graduate levels, by actively involving students in the projects and by developing courses that will provide students with the tools and the theoretical knowledge for independent research. Finally, the project will also open the door to study attention-based deficits in humans and deficits in inhibitory control, such as Attention Deficit Disorders, Obsessive Compulsive Disorders, Depression, Executive Control Function Impairments, Schizophrenia and Dementia. As a researcher of Hispanic background, the investigator is in a unique position to improve minority representation and visibility in science in general and cognitive psychology in particular.