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.
The concrete output of this project consists of 10 published or in press peer reviewed publications (with two more under review). The intellectual contribution of these works is to provide a better understanding of how our recent experiences impact the manner in which we attend to new events. In particular, this work focused on a robust and substantial bias against attending to visual information that was recently attended and rejected (the "selection and rejection cost"). The works demonstrated that this effect is a way that the attention system uses to try to optimize performance based on recent events. The work also shows that the effect works at a categorical level, that is, it is not associated with specific stimuli, but with larger classes of stimuli: if on one trial, attention selects and rejects a set of three faces, for example, this will make it harder for attention to select any face in the near future. The effect is also independent of space and can be observed in the temporal domain, when information is presented sequentially, one object at a time. Finally, our fMRI investigation revealed that the brain regions within the Ventral Attention Network are responsible for this effect. This is also particularly novel since other "recent history effects" associated with attentional success (rather than attentional rejection) have been shown to reside in a separate attention network in the brain (Dorsal Attention Network). The broader impact of this work included the fact that it supported the activities of a minority faculty member (the PI is a Hispanic, who are vastly under-represented in Psychology, and even more so, in experimental psychology), and it also included the mentoring of several graduate students, postdocs and undergraduate students. The work was disseminated through publications in professional journals and in presentations at international conferences.
