Imagine you are driving in the middle lane of a busy three-lane highway, approaching your exit, with the radio on so you can hear the weather report, and with your children in the backseat calling for you. How are you going to manage this situation? Will you ignore all but one thing, and pay full attention to the road signs to determine when to switch lanes, or to cars in the rearview mirror as you change lanes, or to the radio, or to your children? Or will you somehow divide your attention between all of these incoming streams of information? What is the optimal thing to do under these circumstances, and can you do it? With the support of an NSF CAREER award, Dr. George Alvarez at Harvard University will examine whether people can optimize the way they divide their attention, and how this affects their ability to see and accurately report information in their field of view. We are limited in our ability to attend to multiple things at once, and given the limits on our attention, there is an optimal strategy for how to pay attention in any given situation. This optimal strategy could involve flexibly distributing attention (e.g., paying 40% to the road signs, 40% to cars in other lanes, and 20% to the children in the backseat), or using clever strategies for combing information (e.g., you can get the gist of whether the chatter in the backseat requires your immediate attention without paying attention to each individual voice). The proposed research will examine whether, and how, these different strategies are employed to optimize the use of our limited attentional resources.
A basic level understanding of how people optimize the use of their limited attentional resources opens the door to studying the extent to which attention deficits in humans are due to sub-optimal use of available resources. Thus, the results of the research will have implications for disorders such as Attention Deficit Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Autism, Schizophrenia, Dementia, or disorders due to stroke or brain damage, such as Visual Neglect or Executive Dysfunction. In addition, Dr. Alvarez will use the research project as an opportunity to mentor a cadre of undergraduate students from underrepresented groups. Dr. Alvarez helps coordinate a summer research program that places students in labs, providing them with hands on training in conducting behavioral research. As a professor of Hispanic background, Dr. Alvarez is in a unique position to increase minority representation and visibility in the brain and cognitive sciences.
