93119356 Egeth This project is designed to examine the temporal and spatial aspects of attentional selectivity. In the spatial domain, the research is designed to clarify how preattentive and focal attentive processes cooperate in the performance of tasks. In the temporal domain, the focus is on early facilitation and later inhibition following an uninformative cue, with a goal of clarifying when processing is retinocentric, environmentally based, object based, or object centered. The first set of proposed experiments is designed to determine the efficiency with which subjects can avoid distracting material as they search through complicated displays looking for relevant information. Existing work has led to conflicting theoretical explanations of performance in such tasks; and the proposed research should help decide among these competing alternatives. A second set of experiments explores the aftermath of a cue (e.g., the brief brightening of a dim light) that directs attention to a specific location. Such a cue improves the ability to detect targets presented at the cued location. However, what is surprising is that such improvement is short-lived (about 1/2 sec), and is followed by a longer lasting performance decrement. The proposed experiments are an effort to explain the factors that cause this performance decrement. In addition to their theoretical significance, both sets of experiments have significance in the world outside the laboratory. Such work is pertinent to many settings in the work place and may lead to the discovery of methods to reduce the sometimes catastrophic consequences of a failure to pay attention. ****
