Consequences of attentional disruptions for perception, memory, and decision making.

Humans cannot pay attention to everything equally because the brain has limited processing capacity. Instead, we constantly make rapid, dynamic decisions about what to attend to, both in the external environment and in our internal thoughts and goals. In daily life, we also encounter distractions (both external and internal), which further tax our attentional decisions. Deciding what information to prioritize also drives what we end up perceiving and remembering. The current work aims to understand what happens when attention is disrupted and what the consequences are for perception and memory. The work has far-reaching potential applications, ranging from maximizing human intelligence and decision-making in rapidly shifting situations to development of more naturalistic artificial intelligence and wearable biotechnology. A critical part of developing useful tools that can effectively aid human dynamic decision-making in the real world ((e.g., AI-powered smart glasses) involves incorporating knowledge of how dynamic decisions about attention can focus or distort our perceptions, memory, actions, and experience. A combination of behavioral experiments, neuromodulation, and computational analyses are used to investigate how dynamic decisions about spatial attention and distraction affect ongoing perception and memory processing. The work evaluates the idea that spatial distractions not only disrupt filters gating external spatial attention but also disrupt nonspatial filters that gate working memory encoding and internal cognitive control. The team explores whether spatial disruption of external attention is necessary to induce visual working memory intrusions, whether external-to-internal filter disruption is modality-specific, and whether intrusions can be avoided through learning. Complementary disruptions of internal attention (abrupt changes deciding what remembered items are prioritized), explores the consequences of dynamic attentional decisions on feature perception and memory. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2545511 | Program: 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: Julie Golomb | Institution: OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY, THE, COLUMBUS, OH | Award Amount: $615,666 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2545511 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2545511.html