CVS Symposium: The future of visual attention

University Of Rochester, Rochester NY

Investigators

Abstract

Attention is a core component of vision that profoundly influences perception. For example, when an observer focuses their attention on a single object, such as a friend at a crowded party, this can lead to an almost complete filtering of the background. Because of its early and important role in cognitive neuroscience, attention research has remained central to our study of the brain. Recent experiments have suggested that the role of attention is more ubiquitous to brain function than originally appreciated, playing a key role in other domains such as decision-making, executive control, and social interaction. The field of attention research has grown and diversified over the past 20 years, but there has not been a corresponding increase in communication among major thinkers. The goal of this conference is to therefore bring together a diverse group of scholars who study attention and related areas, who take unique, creative, and future-oriented approaches to the problem. Key foci for the meeting will be new multivariate techniques for analysis of neural data, naturalistic behaviors including foraging and social attention, the relationship between attention and learning, and exploration of attention in diverse systems, including babies and patient populations. The meeting will lay out an agenda for the next 20 or 25 years of research in attention and related fields. Because of its orientation towards the future, a key ingredient of our proposal will be the close involvement of post-docs and graduate students, and the explicit focus on attracting a diverse group of attendees. "The Future of Attention" symposium will be held at the University of Rochester in June 2016. Twenty speakers will be invited to attend; all speakers will be high caliber scientists whose work touches on the topic of attention, but whose approach is novel, creative, and/or unusual. The audience will consist of both scientists at the University of Rochester and visitors from around the country. The symposium will be advertised through posters mailed to speakers and other prominent scientists in the field. Plenary talks will be presented along with a poster session and brief presentations. The symposium will be part of a long-running series hosted by the University of Rochester's Center for Visual Sciences. The series has run a meeting every other year, on average, for 50 years. The long history of these meetings has been a key part of the historical field of vision science, broadly speaking; our meeting will carry on that tradition.