At the invitation of the Human Cognition Laboratory, and with a presentation by Dr. Joana Arantes, Dr. Jan Theeuwes will deliver a lecture on "How implicit regularities drive attentional selection" tomorrow, November 29th, at 11 a.m. in the EPsi Amphitheater.
We hope to have your presence!
Bio
Jan Theeuwes graduated cum laude in Experimental Psychology and Ergonomics from Tilburg University. In 1988, he was employed by the TNO Human Factors Institute in the traffic behaviour group and conducted applied human factors research for various national and international government agencies, automotive companies, and the EU. In 1992, he received a PhD cum laude from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Andries F. Sanders, advisor). In 1999 he became a full professor at this University, where he built a new research group. Currently, his ERC group focuses on statistical learning and attention and emotion. He employs among classic psychophysics, techniques such as EEG, fMRI, patient work and modeling. In 2010 he was elected member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Science (KNAW). He received an European Research Council (ERC) advanced grant of 2.5 million euro on reward processing in 2013 and a second ERC advanced grant in 2019 on attention and statistical learning. He was President of ESCoP (European Society for Cognitive Psychology). In 2016, Jan Theeuwes founded the Institute for Brain and Behavior Amsterdam (iBBA), an institute bringing together excellent interdisciplinary research into the psychological, neurological and cognitive aspects underling human behavior. In 2007, Jan Theeuwes established a highly recognized, international two-year research master named Cognitive Neuropsychology, which continues to attract excellent master students from all over the world. Currently, Jan Theeuwes is the director of iBBA and is Distinguished Visiting Research Professor at the William James Center for Research (WJCR) at ISPA, Lisbon.
Abstract
Lingering biases of attentional selection affect the deployment of attention above and beyond top-down and bottom-up control. In this talk I will present an overview of recent studies investigating how statistical learning regarding the distractor determines attentional control. In all these experiments we used the classic additional singleton task in which participants searched for a salient shape singleton while ignoring a color distractor singleton. The distractor singleton was presented more often in one location than in all other locations. Even though observers were not aware of the statistical regularities, we show that the location of the distractor was suppressed proactively relative to all other locations. Moreover, we show that this learning to suppress is highly flexible and adaptive, can be tuned to those moments in time when the distractor is expected and is not affected by working memory load. Critically, explicit awareness of the regularities has no effect on learning. We claim that spatial statistical learning operates by continuously adjusting weights within an assumed “spatial priority map”, which at any moment in time dynamically controls the deployment of covert (and overt) attention. When a location contained relevant information in the past, that location is up-regulated, whereas a location is down-regulated when it has a higher probability of containing distracting information. In this view, selection simply follows the priority landscape that arises after combining a variety of signals, such as current goals and bottom-up saliency, within which priority weights are induced by previous selection episodes.