It has long been appreciated that attention is a core component of vision and that it 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 and has pushed forward several innovative methods for studying the brain including fMRI, EEG, single unit physiology, and mathematical techniques. More recent experiments have suggested that the role of attention is more ubiquitous to brain function than originally appreciated, playin a key role in other domains such as decision-making, executive control, social interaction, and form vision. The goal of this conference is to bring together a diverse group of scholars who study attention and related areas - but who take unique, different, 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. We hope our meeting will serve to 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. We will attract post-docs and students with travel awards. We will arrange two short format data blitzes, one for post-docs and another for graduate students. We will host a careers roundtable in conjunction with the Rochester Chapter of the SFN.
Attention research has long served as a leader in the development of influential new ideas in cognitive and basic neuroscience. As the field continues to diversify, it is increasingly difficultto keep track of the various advances. The 30th Symposium of the Center for Visual Science will bring together a diverse array of scholars that are leading attention research into new and often very different directions. The meeting will provide a forum to discuss the many connections that lie between these new directions, defining a path forward for future research. The involvement of younger scholars (graduate students and postdocs) will also be a major component of this meeting.
