Characterizing the Determinants of Goal-Driven Attentional Control

Ohio State University, The, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

Humans receive far more visual information in each moment than they can possibly process. A major question is how people attend to the information that is most relevant to their current goals and ignore distracting, irrelevant information. One strategy is that people focus their attention on specific properties of objects, such as their color, shape, or location. However, previous research has shown that people do not always control their attention in an optimal way. Additionally, little is known about the factors motivating how people choose to control their attention. The current project will investigate the role of three factors that may influence how attention is controlled: 1) performance maximization (the drive to achieve a goal as quickly as possible); 2) effort minimization (avoiding tasks that are cognitively taxing); and 3) novelty-seeking (exploring new stimuli in the environment). Using a new method to measure all three of these factors, the research team will establish each individual's unique "Attention Control Profile." Providing a detailed analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of an individual's attentional control strategies may have important implications for screening and training employees in professions that depend heavily on attentional control, such as drivers, security agents, and air traffic controllers. The Attention Control Profile may also be helpful for assessing attentional control deficits in special populations, such as individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), schizophrenia, or damage to frontal or parietal brain regions. In addition to the broader scientific contributions, this project will provide training to undergraduate students, graduate students and post-doctoral researchers at The Ohio State University, with an emphasis on including women and members from groups underrepresented in science. This project uses a combination of behavioral and eye-tracking measures to develop an Attention Control Profile for each participating individual, using a new visual search task that is designed to reproduce essential aspects of real-world search. The task allows individuals to choose freely among multiple different attentional control strategies, in order to find one of multiple possible search targets. Additionally, the task features a search display that varies continuously over time, which will prompt individuals to adjust their control strategies dynamically. The investigators will explore how effectively individuals choose search targets, adapt their control strategies to the changing environment, and ignore irrelevant information. This will, in turn, provide a metric for how much each individual's attentional control is influenced by performance maximization, effort minimization and novelty-seeking. The project also explores the underlying sources of individual variation in attentional control, by examining whether an individual's strategy depends on motivational state (e.g., when fast performance receives high rewards) or specific personality traits (e.g., impulsivity or deliberateness). These methods will enable the researchers to provide a tool for measuring individualized attentional control profiles and will help unpack the motivations underlying the use of different attentional control strategies.