Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Visual attention significantly impacts human behavior. Based on what we see, we decide where to go and what to do, for example. Yet, it remains surprisingly unknown how attention impacts cognitive mechanisms in the long term. For example, does attending to some elements in the environment impact subsequent abilities to identify, process, and memorize those elements later? The investigation of the long-term effects of attention on cognition is the overall objective of my program. The innovative nature of my program resides in the methodological approach. Previous research has often studied the effects of attention on current tasks (e.g., reading). My program aims to investigate the effects of attention on later cognitive processes (e.g., attention, memory, perception). Additionally, the effects of attention were previously studied using nonsocial stimuli (e.g., object brightness), but it was subsequently discovered that these findings were poor predictors of attention in social situations (when the stimuli can respond to participants' attention). Thus, studying social attention has become a way to access a fuller range of attentional functions. In particular, whereas current attention research mostly investigates the basic unit of two-person interactions, my research has established methods to study attention in more complex three-person groups, which offer more than one attentional target and thus allow attentional selection to come to the fore. Thanks to these innovations, my program will be able to investigate diverse attentional functions applicable in both social and nonsocial settings and identify their effects on individual cognition. Consequently, this approach promises grand-breaking advances in the understanding of the role of attention in guiding human cognition. In the next five years, my program will study the impact of group attentional patterns on individual cognitive processes. The three short-term objectives (STOs) are to 1) quantify the impact of attention on subsequent individual members' cognitive processes; 2) identify the mechanisms of such an impact; 3) clarify the boundaries of such attention-cognition link. The principle guiding my program is the notion that attention fundamentally impacts subsequent cognitive processing at multiple levels (STO1) in ways that may be contextually modulated (STO2) and uniquely human (STO3). A more complete theory of attention will result from this research, one that encompasses lab-based studies of attention as well as the complexities of real-world situations to characterize how attention impacts human cognition at multiple levels. Such an approach will benefit academic and non-academic knowledge on attention and group function while providing ample opportunities for training HQP in multiple capacities (undergraduate, graduate, postdoctoral) and fostering their learning of both scientific and transferrable skills in cognition, information processing, and applied neuroscience.