Images in the mind: The control of visual object selection by attentional templates

Our perception of the external visual world and the ways in which we interact with this world are strongly affected by our current expectations, intentions, and our previous experience. Even though we may subjectively feel that our conscious experiences and our actions are primarily determined by the outside world, it is our active mind that shapes what we perceive and how we react to the external world at any given moment. What we become aware of is determined by what we attend to, and what we attend to is determined by "images in the mind" (attentional templates) that guide our attention in line with our goals and preferences.
The essential role of the active guiding mind in the control of attention was already highlighted by William James in 1890, but we still know surprisingly little about the nature of attentional templates, and about how these templates determine which object(s) are attended at any time. In the research proposed here, we will apply new experimental procedures and new methodological techniques (including temporally precise measures of electrical brain activity obtained while observers are engaged in attentional selection tasks) to answer some of the fundamental questions that have been debated by experimental psychologists for more than a century. We will investigate how many things we can attend to at any time, and expect to find that the answer suggested by William James ("not easily more than one") may be correct. We will study the adverse consequences of having to simultaneously attend to multiple objects in perception, visual working memory, and action. Are there systematic differences between individuals in their ability to attend to more than one thing at a time? Is this ability age-dependent and can it be improved by training? We will also investigate how the "image in the mind" is organised: Do attentional templates represent integral visual objects, or do they include lists of the visual features that define a current goal object? An answer to this question will have important consequences for current theoretical models of how attention operates. Finally, and very importantly, we will develop new methods to obtain precise measures of the speed of voluntary visual attention shifts: If attention is engaged at a particular location, how fast can it be moved to a new potentially relevant object? And how fast can we change the "image in the mind" if we want to guide our attention to a different object? Our initial results suggest that the top-down guidance of attention can be much faster and is more flexible than is usually believed, and we will now find out whether and under which circumstances this is the case.
The question how "images in the mind" control conscious experience and voluntary action is central to theories of selective attention. Finding new answers to this question will have important general theoretical and conceptual implications for attention research. But our research is also important from an applied perspective. A defining feature of life in our technologically advanced society is the attentional competition between multiple sources of information, which result in permanent demands on attentional object selection and choice. New insights into how attentional templates guide what individuals perceive and how they choose to act therefore has obvious practical implications for areas as diverse as education, workplace design, and economic decision making.

Attentional templates ("images in the mind") control which objects and events we perceive and select, and which types of actions we choose at any given moment. Although the research proposed in this project is primarily basic cognitive/psychological research into the fundamental properties of these "images" and how they affect perception and action, insights from our research will also have practical implications, which we intend to disseminate to the wider public as well as to interested user groups.
In real-world contexts, visual search for target objects and events, and its control by attentional templates, has obvious practical applications in specialist fields where professionals with high expertise and extensive training are expected to make critical decisions based on potentially ambiguous visual information, such as in security contexts (e.g., security officers searching scanned x-ray images of luggage for suspicious items) and in medical diagnostics (e.g., a radiologist examining MRI scans for abnormal tissue). A better understanding of the factors that determine successful target detection may help to improve user interfaces in such contexts. It may also have general implications for the search strategies employed by specialists involved in such tasks (e.g., feature-based search sets linked to the colour-coding of organic versus non-organic substances in airport security scanners), and thus for their training.
We will make all outcomes of our research available not only through the standard routes (publications in peer-reviewed top-quality journals), but also through posting of the most relevant findings on the website, as well as through directly informing the media about findings that are likely to be of interest to the general public. In addition, we will actively explore possibilities of directly communicating with experts in relevant applied fields (e.g., institutions or individuals involved in the training of specialist personnel responsible for real-life visual search tasks, as in medical or security-related contexts; visual interface designers for scanning or general monitoring devices). We will work with Birkbeck's Business Relations unit to contact institutions and individuals in these applied areas, with the longer-term aim of establishing collaborative links that could result in more formal interactions, such as a knowledge transfer partnership. The Department of Psychology is currently in the process of appointing an Impact Officer who will be specifically involved in promoting impact-related activities associated with scientific research in our department. We anticipate that the applied implications of the research proposed here will make it particularly suitable for such future impact initiatives.
The applicant has also been active in promoting the impact-related aspects of experimental attention research to audiences beyond the narrow confines of experimental psychology. He was one of the keynote speaker at an interdisciplinary workshop on "The Psychology and Economics of Scarce Attention" at the Institut d'Economie Industrielle in Toulouse in September 2011, which brought together world-leading psychologists, neuroscientists, and economists to discuss how cognitive and neuroanatomical constraints determine how human subjects allocate attention, and the implications of this for economic decision-making. A detailed pamphlet summarizing the outcome of this meeting by Diane Coyle (www.enlightenmenteconomics.com) is available on-line (http://www.idei.fr/doc/conf/psy/2011/summary.pdf). We will maintain and extend these contacts with economists, and will seek to develop the translational aspects of our research in order to apply them to issues associated with choice and selection, as addressed by economists.