Experience-Driven Attention
Attention is often studied as either an involuntary response to salient stimuli like flashing lights or a voluntary process to help us achieve goals like finding a set of lost keys. In addition to serving these functions, attention is implicitly shaped by our experiences to help us adapt to changing environments. We learn to attend to aversively conditioned stimuli, rewarded stimuli, and stimulus features and locations often associated with our search targets. Most of our work on this topic investigates how experience-driven attention differs from other better-understood types of attention to help us build better models of how attention works.
Avoiding Visual Distraction
People don’t just use attention to focus on what they care about; they also use it to ignore what they don’t care about. We’re interested in understanding why and how we’re so good at ignoring distracting information, the situations in which we aren’t so good, and how the science of attention can make us better. Our work on this topic suggests that it’s easier to implicitly learn to ignore a distractor than it is to do so via conscious effort.
Attention in Vision and Audition
Attention has different effects in vision and audition. Is this because humans have different cognitive mechanisms to support attention in each modality, or only because the effects of attention are shaped by the neural coding of stimulus features that differ from one modality to the next? We have ongoing research regarding how attention operates within and across modalities and the extent to which this is a function of the features being attended.
Attention and Vision Loss
We’re interested in the interactions between attention and vision loss, particularly in central visual field loss. These interactions are bidirectional, in that improving attentional function (e.g., through behavioral training) can reduce everyday disabilities associated with vision loss while at the same time visual field loss can impair the ability to effectively deploy visuospatial attention. We have used clinical studies of people with central vision loss as well as gaze-contingent viewing in normally sighted individuals to understand how attention affects and is affected by vision loss.
