Visual Cognition Projects
Attentional blink and repetition blindness phenomena
Advisor: Associate Professor Veronika Coltheart (MACCS)
Co-advisor: Dr. Daniel Loach (MACCS)
The research project will investigate the way we comprehend and remember briefly presented sequences of visual stimuli, such as single letters, words, pictures of objects and faces. How is information presented at rates of 8-10 items per second registered in memory for report? How do the processes differ from those available to encode information in short-term memory? With rapid presentation there are processing limitations, notably repetition blindness and the attentional blink. Repetition blindness refers to a deficit in detecting and reporting both occurrences of a repeated item when the repetition occurs within half a second of the first. The attentional blink refers to a difficulty observers have in detecting two unrelated targets in a sequence of distractors and this difficulty is likewise transient. Despite their similarity, the attentional blink and repetition blindness are assumed to arise at different processing stages. The project will study processes underlying these phenomena.
Further Readings:
Coltheart, V. (ed.). (1999). Fleeting Memories: Cognition of brief visual stimuli. Cambridge: MIT Press
Dux, P., & Coltheart, V. (2005). The meaning of the mask matters: Evidence of conceptual interference in the attentional blink. Psychological Science, 16, 775-779.
Gaze cues and object-based attention
Advisor: Dr. Alexandra Frischen (MACCS)
Co-advisor: Dr. Robyn Langdon (MACCS), Dr. Melanie Porter (MACCS)
This project investigates location-based and object-based attention effects in response to social gaze cues. For successful social interactions, it is important to understand another person's intentions. One vital clue to decoding these intentions is the other person's current focus of attention, as indicated by their direction of that person's eye gaze. Indeed, recent studies have shown that observing another's gaze direction triggers automatic shifts of attention in the corresponding direction. This way, the observer comes to focus on the same object that is currently being attended to by the other person (i.e., 'joint attention'). This implies that the 'object of attention' should play a vital role in this interaction. However, previous gaze-cueing studies typically cued empty locations in space rather than specific objects, or confounded both frames of reference. The project asks whether gaze-evoked attention orienting operates within a strictly location-based frame of reference, or whether attention can also be associated with an object. A number of issues are of interest here, for example: How do attentional effects compare when empty space is cued, as compared to a coherent object? Are facilitatory and inhibitory components of attention affected differently? Can attention move along with an object in a dynamic display? Do gaze-evoked attention shifts towards a specific object 'prime' subsequent processing of identical or related objects? Finally, all of these questions could be examined by looking at individual differences such as gender or autistic tendencies.
Further Readings:
Frischen, A., & Tipper, S.P. (2004). Orienting Attention Via Observed Gaze Shift Evokes Longer Term Inhibitory Effects: Implications for Social Interactions, Attention, and Memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 133, 516-533.
Jordan, H., & Tipper, S.P. (1998). Object-based inhibition of return in static displays. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 5, 504-509.