Imagine driving down a busy street full of pedestrians, other cars, traffic signs and signals, and potential road hazards. In order to drive safely down this street, one must be continuously aware of all of these stimuli, ready to react to any changes. Dealing with this complexity would be relatively straightforward if one were able to maintain a mental representation of all of this information at once. Recent evidence, however, suggests that mental representations of the world in the "mind's eye" are not nearly as detailed as the world itself. For example, people routinely fail to notice large changes in their surroundings, leading some to suggest that much of the visual environment is not sustained in the mind's eye. Why do we keep some aspects of our surroundings in mind and not others? The key appears to lie in the "focus" of the mind's eye called visual attention: those aspects of our surroundings that we give particular attention to are more likely to be sustained in mind. To understand the sustained representation of the world in the mind, therefore, it is necessary to examine the factors that influence focus of the mind's eye. With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Robert Gordon will examine how the mind's eye develops and sustains meaningful scenes and objects within the mind. Dr. Gordon combines three approaches that are sensitive to the very earliest moments of perception and argues that previous studies have not used such approaches. Participants in Dr. Gordon's experiments view full-color scenes depicting familiar environments. In some experiments, the distribution of their attention will be assessed in order to identify the factors that determine where people pay attention while viewing meaningful scenes. In other experiments, the consequences of attentional selection for the representation of such scenes will be investigated. Together, the results of the experiments will help reveal the processes that allow people to perceive and comprehend visual information. Broader impacts include implications for the design of displays in which users must rapidly extract visual information. Moreover, the project will integrate research and educational goals by supporting graduate and undergraduate students who contribute to the research.
