These NSF Starter Grant Funds will support one year of research infrastructure for a PI who has just completed an NSF Minority Post-Doc Fellowship and is now in a tenure-track position in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign. Funds will provide research support for a proposed project examining the phenomenon of Rapid Resumption, which the PI discovered during his NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of British Columbia (NSF award #0309998). The initial experiments conducted are described in a paper accepted for publication in the journal Psychological Science, a leading peer reviewed journal in the field. The project focuses on Rapid Resumption, which refers to the phenomenon that humans are much better at resuming a search after an interruption, than they are at initially starting the search. The phenomenon is studied using a paradigm that the researchers call interrupted search. In this paradigm, participants are shown a visual search display for a brief period of time ("look" time = 100 ms) in alternation with a blank display ("wait" time = 900 ms). Because of the task difficulty, participants cannot finish the search with just one look at the display and therefore, are forced to interrupt their search behavior until the search display re-appears. Under such interruption conditions, the researchers showed that participants are very good at resuming their search (as measured by very fast reaction times following each display reappearance), thus the name of Rapid Resumption (RR). The results showed that when participants "rapidly resume" the search task, they do so with no previous conscious knowledge nor any intuition about the target identity. Thus, the researchers interpreted RR as a case of "rapid perception" that comes about because of interactions between visual processes (at play during search) and memory processes (at play during the interruptions). The goal of this project is to continue the study of this phenomenon so that a better understanding can be achieved on how vision and memory interact during search, and more generally, how these systems interact to provide a stable perceptual representation of the world around us. In this project, nine specific experiments are proposed to study RR (not including pilot and/or follow-up studies that may be necessary). The proposed work will advance our knowledge of an important everyday human behavior: how is it that humans search their environment, particularly under conditions where they have to repeatedly interrupt their search behavior (as we often must do). Second, it will provide us with new insights regarding the interactions between two important cognitive systems: memory and vision. Studying the nature of these interactions will also enhance our understanding of various other cognitive phenomena where these two systems are involved (e.g., Change Blindness, Inattentional Blindness, and Contextual Cueing among others). Third, this line of research is the first to investigate the act of "resumption", i.e., of reengaging on a previously interrupted task. While most research on the task-switching literature has found cognitive costs to switching from one task to another, this is the first research to show a natural ability for humans to go back to a previously started task. The principal investigator is committed to using research as an educational experience, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels and to disseminate research findings via presentations at professional conferences and publications in peer-reviewed journals. Also, by supporting this project, the NSF will be supporting the participation of Hispanics in the field of psychology. Last, the broader significance of this work extends to applied fields studying how human operators interact with complex systems, in which they often have to perform multiple tasks in tandem. The work has the potential to be extended in such a way that guidelines may be able to be developed that would alleviate some of the cognitive costs usually present in multi-task environments (for example, by allowing operators to quickly return to a previously unfinished task, so that they may rapidly resume it).
