Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

From baggage screening to a classroom lecture, attention plays a critical role. To understand how to improve performance on such tasks, we need to better understand attention. My NSERC Discovery program investigates the circumstances that lead to selective attentional effects? The long term goal is to ground attentional effects in a causal chain that starts with experimental manipulation and runs via neurophysiological mechanisms. In my current NSERC award I demonstrated probability was an attentional cue. Probability affects response speed, behavioural performance and early visual brain responses (visual evoked potentials [EP]). The research in the current proposal uses the tools of human psychophysics, eye tracking, and non-invasive neuro-electrophysiology (EEG/EP) to pursue several thematically linked objectives. Psychophysically how does reward contingent on performance impact visual search and discrimination, and how does it interact with stimulus probability? Are the electrophysiological effects of probability and reward the same as attention? And can we understand these joint effects best through the conceptual and computational framework of the Bayesian Decision Process? Electrophysiologically this research will investigate if the effects of performance contingent reward are also seen in early visual parts of the brain, and whether they mimic attentional effects on the N2Pc EP, the EEG signal most associated with attention. Additional experiments will expand the research from stimulus driven attention to voluntary attention also, combining subjective measures with the objective metrics of simultaneously recorded eye tracking of where a person looks and for how long. Contemporary with these empirical projects I will continue modelling probability and reward effects using established computational models of learning and adaptation. I will continue to advance the longer term project of integrating all these effects and levels into a single Bayesian Decision Process account of attention that is empirically robust, computationally coherent, predictive, and theoretically concrete. The theoretical and empirical advances from this research will directly support the NSERC mission. The research program will train HQP in a critical subject area and in-demand technical skills. An improved understanding of attention will lead to more specific and effective applications in education and in industries where sustained selective monitoring is required. Ultimately, an improved understanding of attention is central to a better understanding of human cognition. Such scientific knowledge will be increasingly important as Canada's engineering effort to build better and more human artificial intelligences progresses.