Brainstorm Lab

ATTENTIONAL PRIORITY AND THE STRATEGIC CONTROL OF ATTENTION

led by Molly McKinney within the
Learning and Attention Lab at Texas A&M University
with Principal Investigator, Dr. Brian Anderson

Research Program
Attentional Priority and Strategic Control of Attention

Motivating Strategic Control of Attention

Make more optimal choices

Participants who experienced an inefficient visual search environment had significantly more optimal choices than their naïve counterparts, suggesting this inefficient environment motivated strategic control.

Strategize performance

Individuals who were faster to find item in optimal subset in inefficient visual search phase were more likely to select optimal targets in free-choice phase.

Our current studies are investigating the mechanisms and construction of strategies motivated by "finding a better way" to do the task.

Biasing Attentional Priority

Experience-dependent attentional capture

Participants were biased by stimuli previously associated with physical effort, resulting in faster response times when that feature (color) was the target and more oculomotor capture when that feature was the distractor.

Stimuli previously associated with shock produced a bias only in contexts that were not associated with physical effort. However, the proportion of trials in which individuals were captured by the distractor were numerically double that of previous studies.

Our current studies are evaluating the effect of uncertainty on attentional biases, and investigating ways in which individuals can overcome these biases.

Modulating Salience

Learning to enhance or suppress salience

Compared to trials in which the singleton was absent, the distractor group learned to ignore the salient distractor, and the target group learned to enhance the salient target. Participants in the variable group (where the singleton could either be a target or a distractor) were biased to attend to the uninformative salient stimulus.

Experience modulated perceived salience

Participants who learned to suppress were less effective at detecting salient stimuli. This experiment provides preliminary evidence that the mechanisms that support suppression and enhancement may occur as early as the level of perception.

Neutral Color