CAREER: Reward learning, selection history, and attentional control

From a parade of internal thoughts, feelings, and memories, to an ever-changing barrage of external sights, sounds, and smells, waking life contains far more information than our nervous systems can handle at any one time. We overcome this challenge by selectively attending to the world; that is, by prioritizing the processing of some kinds of information at the expense of others.

But how is attention allocated and how much voluntary control do we have over that process? The answers to these research questions have vast implications for individual experience, and for society at large. This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project advances our scientific understanding of how an observer’s past modulates their attention in the present.

In addition to informing research in other core areas of psychology like learning and memory, the research outcomes have applications to clinical work, as aberrant attentional mechanisms are hypothesized to play a role in a multitude of mental health disorders (e.g., substance abuse, anxiety disorders, autism spectrum disorder). The PI is a faculty member at a primarily undergraduate institution, and this project provides unique opportunities for undergraduate research training and for STEM-focused innovation in the undergraduate classroom.

As an additional component of the education plan, the PI furthers efforts to raise the visibility of established scientists from underrepresented communities and promotes inclusive mentoring in the service of retaining underrepresented students in science.

Visual attention can be allocated to specific locations in the visual field or to features of objects like color, orientation, or motion direction. Sometimes, shifts of attention are voluntarily generated to support goal-directed behavior. Other times, attention is “captured” by physically salient objects (e.g., those that suddenly appear or are visually unique).

While framing attention in such dichotomous terms has been the dominant theoretical approach for many decades, the literature now makes clear that non-salient stimuli can also capture attention. Such attentional biases rely on one’s unique history (e.g., if objects have been frequently attended in the past, or if they have been associated with receiving reward).

Using behavioral and eye-tracking methods, the first research goal of this CAREER project is to disentangle the impact of two such historical factors on attentional control: frequent attentional allocation (selection history) and receiving of rewards (reward history). The second goal is to use functional brain imaging to examine the neural systems involved in selection-history-derived attentional biases and to test the hypothesis that information prediction errors generated by the ventral striatum modulate the allocation of visual attention.

Whereas Aims 1 and 2 of the project focus on physically non-salient features that bias attention as a result of former experience, Aim 3 shifts the focus to physically salient stimuli and examines how saliency and history interact. Extending recent work from the PI’s laboratory, the third goal is to use psychophysical methods to model the temporal dynamics of visual processing when attention has been reflexively allocated by abrupt onsets that predict the presence or absence of available reward.

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.