I need to make it accessible to reasonably intelligent (inb4 khi bashing) people that don't have a neuroscience or psych background. i'm at disney and a little drunk so I have no idea if it makes any sense at all derppppp.
Interactions between Visual Long-Term Memory Retrieval and Visual Attention
William James, largely considered the father of attention research, pioneered the spot-light metaphor of attention. Like a spot-light, we guide our attention through a scene, attending to the objects that fall under that illumination. While the story is admittedly more complicated, this basic idea drives a substantial amount of modern attentional research. One prominent question investigates the mechanisms that drive that spotlight, and how different modalities can influence top-down control. Specifically, we investigated, and will continue to investigate, how long-term memory (LTM) influences performance on visual attention tasks. Our pilot experiments show that LTM enhances visual attention; as expected, subjects performed better on trials they had previously encoded.
The experimental paradigm included both visual attention and LTM components. These components account for, respectively, an “encoding” and “retrieval” phrase. The initial encoding phase consisted of a change-blindness task. An image of a scene appeared on screen, followed by a brief, gray mask (blank screen). The original image then reappeared, with either one of four events occurring: one change in the image, two changes in the image, three changes in the image, or no change in the image. Subjects were instructed to report the change(s) they detected. This pattern continued for ten cycles; after the tenth cycle, the gray mask was removed and the second image immediately followed the first. This second pattern repeated for another ten cycles. The addition of the second pattern ensured that subjects detected the change, if any occurred.
The retrieval phase immediately followed encoding. Again, subjects performed a change-blindness task with images of scenes. A number of these trials were taken from the encoding phase. During the retrieval trials, however, images either had one change or no change-- and the pattern of “image, gray mask, image” only cycled once, and very briefly. If a change occurred in the scenes that appeared in both phases, it remained the same (if an image in the encoding phase had two or three changes, only one of those would carry over). Alternatively, some trials in the retrieval phrase that did not have a change may originally have had one during encoding. Because subjects had to report detected changes quickly, we instructed them to attend to the locations where a change previously occurred.
As we hypothesized, subjects performed significantly better on trials they had seen during the encoding phase. These results indicate that LTM helped guide attention to the location-- providing supporting evidence for an enhancement effect of LTM on visual attention. Future studies will add a maintenance phase between the encoding and retrieval tasks. This maintenance phase will include an incidental visual short-term memory task (VSTM). This task will provide a controlled break for the subjects and be used to ensure that information from the encoding phase is actually stored in LTM. Further, we plan to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to view functional activity and study the neural correlates during the task.
Interactions between Visual Long-Term Memory Retrieval and Visual Attention
William James, largely considered the father of attention research, pioneered the spot-light metaphor of attention. Like a spot-light, we guide our attention through a scene, attending to the objects that fall under that illumination. While the story is admittedly more complicated, this basic idea drives a substantial amount of modern attentional research. One prominent question investigates the mechanisms that drive that spotlight, and how different modalities can influence top-down control. Specifically, we investigated, and will continue to investigate, how long-term memory (LTM) influences performance on visual attention tasks. Our pilot experiments show that LTM enhances visual attention; as expected, subjects performed better on trials they had previously encoded.
The experimental paradigm included both visual attention and LTM components. These components account for, respectively, an “encoding” and “retrieval” phrase. The initial encoding phase consisted of a change-blindness task. An image of a scene appeared on screen, followed by a brief, gray mask (blank screen). The original image then reappeared, with either one of four events occurring: one change in the image, two changes in the image, three changes in the image, or no change in the image. Subjects were instructed to report the change(s) they detected. This pattern continued for ten cycles; after the tenth cycle, the gray mask was removed and the second image immediately followed the first. This second pattern repeated for another ten cycles. The addition of the second pattern ensured that subjects detected the change, if any occurred.
The retrieval phase immediately followed encoding. Again, subjects performed a change-blindness task with images of scenes. A number of these trials were taken from the encoding phase. During the retrieval trials, however, images either had one change or no change-- and the pattern of “image, gray mask, image” only cycled once, and very briefly. If a change occurred in the scenes that appeared in both phases, it remained the same (if an image in the encoding phase had two or three changes, only one of those would carry over). Alternatively, some trials in the retrieval phrase that did not have a change may originally have had one during encoding. Because subjects had to report detected changes quickly, we instructed them to attend to the locations where a change previously occurred.
As we hypothesized, subjects performed significantly better on trials they had seen during the encoding phase. These results indicate that LTM helped guide attention to the location-- providing supporting evidence for an enhancement effect of LTM on visual attention. Future studies will add a maintenance phase between the encoding and retrieval tasks. This maintenance phase will include an incidental visual short-term memory task (VSTM). This task will provide a controlled break for the subjects and be used to ensure that information from the encoding phase is actually stored in LTM. Further, we plan to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to view functional activity and study the neural correlates during the task.
! And kind of. The lab is at my university, but I'm working through a grant instead of getting credit for a course.