Attention Training

Our subjective worlds are built from those things in our internal and external environments that capture our attention. Environments can be ambiguous with respect to which objects are most important for our attention, and the characteristics of stimuli that allow them to dominate attention are thus of great interest. Self-relevant objects, such as internally generated experience (e.g. thought), may receive substantial attention, but research on this dimension has been hampered by the difficulty of measuring such objects experimentally. The proposed study seeks to make headway in this area using several behavioral (accuracy, response time, response pattern) measures, with the hypothesis that internally generated experience will vie for attention in a way reflected by behavior. Such research will extend previous work the investigators' lab has done studying stimulus parameters that influence attention, and as a whole may present a more complete picture of how objects and attention interact to shape our worlds.