Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Components of human selective attention In our everyday lives we are presented with more information than we can possibly take in. For this reason we continually have to select what information we will act on, and what information we are going to discard and ignore. This selective process of attending to some information to the exclusion of other information is the focus of my research. Information can be selected in one of two ways. It can be overt, that is, in a manner that is visible to others, such as when one looks left and right before crossing the street; or the selection can be covert, such as when one eavesdrops on a conversation. Either form of orienting can be triggered in a volitional manner (endogenously) or automatically (exogenously). The focus of my research program is to understand how these different forms of orienting, and their control, interact. My studies occur in the natural world and in controlled laboratory settings. The studies presented in this application are representative of this broader program of research. The experiments pursue the radical hypothesis that, at least in the realm of orienting attention to biologically relevant information, the prevailing theory that overt and covert attention are positively linked might be incorrect. Instead, their association might be negatively correlated, such that, for example, avoiding overtly looking at someone's eyes might be linked and offset by attending covertly to those eyes. The idea emerging from this proposal in particular, and my program of research in general, is that the principles of attentional selection are molded by the context in which they operate. It is intended that a more complete theory of attention will result from this research, one that encompasses basic lab-based studies of overt and covert attention as well as the complexities of real world situations.