2021 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
What guides attention when searching the mind?
| Project/Area Number |
21K20306
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| Research Institution | Waseda University |
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Principal Investigator |
KONG Garry 早稲田大学, 高等研究所, 講師(任期付) (70906370)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2021-08-30 – 2023-03-31
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| Keywords | Attention / Visual Working Memory / Visual Cognition / Visual Search |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
Attention is the ability to filter out irrelevant noise and focus only on what is currently important. It is typically studied in the context of attending to perception, i.e., directly externally towards the world. However, attention can also be directed internally, towards objects held in visual working memory. This project aimed to investigate this internally-directed attention, and specifically, how this process compared to the typical externally-directed attention.
For the first leg of this project, we hypothesised that differences between visual and memory representations in the brain would inevitable cause differences in how attention would interact with the two. Previous research on external attention suggests that only a single feature can be attended to at a time in perception, but this attended feature can be switched at will, rapidly and effortlessly. This research project found that when internally attending to visual working memory, attention can then be drawn only to a single, primary feature. Accessing other features first required going through the primary feature. In other words, this primary feature acts as an attentional index through which the objects in memory can be subsequently accessed. Furthermore, the choice of the primary feature appears to be under volitional control, likely selected at the time of memory encoding.
The first leg of this project is now complete. I has been written up as a manuscript for submission to a scientific journal and will be presented at the Vision Sciences Society 2022.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
2: Research has progressed on the whole more than it was originally planned.
Reason
This first leg of the project has been completed, in line with expectations.
The second leg is currently ongoing, but the COVID-19 restrictions have made it difficult to do in-person testing. I have begun an external collaboration with Daryl Fougnie at New York University Abu Dhabi to aid in collecting data.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
The first leg of the project confirmed that attention is indeed acts upon visual working memory representations themselves. Since visual working memory representations are more conceptual than visual perceptual representation, we hypothesise that it is possible to direct attention towards high-level conceptual features, something normally impossible in externally directed attention.
The second leg of the project, therefore, is an investigation into attention towards higher-level representations in visual working memory. This leg of the project is ongoing, with 2/4 planned experiments completed.
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| Causes of Carryover |
Restrictions on participant testing due to COVID-19 meant that I did not purchase the equipment required to scale up participant testing. As restrictions are lifted during AY2022, I anticipate making these purchases and testing more people.
I also did not hire an RA this year, as I anticipated doing, as the lack of testing capacity would have made it unnecessary. I plan to do so this year.
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Research Products
(1 results)
