Event Date
Speakers: Joy Geng, Professor, with Phil Witkowski and Xinger Yu, Center for Mind and Brain, UC Davis
Title: Studies of attentional control in human brain and behavior
Abstract: Goal-driven human behaviors, such as looking for a friend in the crowd, require the ability to hold task-relevant "target" information in memory in order to guide behavior. This information is referred to commonly as the "target template". Traditionally, models of attention have assumed that information in the template is a veridical copy of the actual target. However, recent evidence suggests that the template may be a modulated version of target information that maximizes the distinctiveness of the target from surrounding distractors in the environment. In this talk, we will describe a series of studies that investigate how information about task targets are learned and updated to guide attentional processes. Our findings suggest that human observers are highly sensitive to the reliability of visual target features and to target-to-distractor feature relationships. These learned expectations are then used to more optimally guide attention and facilitate behavior.
Seminar Date/Time: Thursday October 1st, 4:10pm
This seminar will be delivered remotely via Zoom. To access the Zoom meeting for this seminar, please contact the instructor Fushing Hsieh (fhsieh@ucdavis.edu) or Pete Scully (pscully@ucdavis.edu) for the meeting ID and password, stating your affiliation.