Marcia Grabowecky - US grants

Visual attention is crucial for many aspects of human behavior--inability to focus attention can result in reduced productivity, impaired learning, and even accidents. At the same time, excessively focused attention may impair the ability to integrate information, to multi-task, and to flexibly adapt to rapidly changing environments. Balanced attention abilities are needed for optimal performance. Behavioral and neuroscientific investigations have identified a variety of core processes. For example, if a target is likely to appear at a specific spatial location, focusing attention at that location, while inhibiting distracting signals in other locations, will facilitate target detection. However, if the target could appear anywhere or if information from different locations must be integrated, it is better to distribute attention across a large region. When targets occur infrequently and unpredictably, attention needs to be maintained over long intervals so that a target will not be missed. While many of these specific attention abilities are well understood, little is known about how they relate to one another.
With funding from the National Science Foundation, Drs. Suzuki and Grabowecky will begin to fill this gap by systematically investigating interrelationships among attentional processes. Their strategy is to examine correlations in a broad battery of attention tasks to determine which attention abilities share the same underlying mechanisms, which tend to change together, which compete for common resources, which facilitate or inhibit one another, and which are independent. The administration of the attention battery to a large number of people will also reveal whether there are reliable individual differences in attention profiles. For example, an individual may have strong abilities in centrally focusing attention and rapidly re-engaging attention, moderate abilities in attentive tracking, attention shifting and vigilance, and weak abilities in distributing attention and object-based attention. The results will reveal how traits (e.g., gender, personality, intelligence), experiences (e.g., playing video games, music, sports), and state (arousal, stress, mood, sleep, circadian rhythm) influence attention abilities, yielding a comprehensive model of human visual attention. Establishing the normative attention profile will be useful for its own sake. For example, it would allow evaluation of individuals with learning difficulties to determine what attention abilities are selectively impaired, which would be useful for the design of appropriate educational programs. In addition to elucidating how various attention mechanisms work together with the goal of an integrative theory of attention, the database and techniques developed will also be useful to a broad range of researchers, clinicians, and educators, both for diagnosis and for potential development of specific treatments.