Item Details

title

CONTRIBUTIONS OF ATTENTIONAL MECHANISMS TO URGENT PERCEPTUAL DECISION MAKING UNDER DYNAMIC CONDITIONS

author

Kattner, Evan

abstract

ABSTRACTIn daily life, our visual system receives constant input from our environment. Visual attention is the mechanism by which we select information from the visual scene to dedicate our limited computational resources to processing further. Traditionally, tasks aimed at uncovering how these mechanisms drive perceptual decision making have implemented a rigid structure, impacting their generalizability to more natural viewing conditions. To address this limitation, we have developed SpotChase, a gamified task aimed to replicate natural viewing conditions more faithfully by removing the structure imposed in traditional tasks and keep participants engaged by including a scoring system. The present study aimed to use SpotChase as a means to explore how attentional mechanisms interact and contribute to our decision of where to look next in a more dynamic environment. The behavioral measure of interest, the tachometric curve, served as a means to compare this paradigm to traditional trial-based tasks used previously by our lab. What we found is that SpotChase is both able to replicate findings from traditional tasks, as well as uncover other previously unobserved behavioral phenomena. This establishes SpotChase as a viable platform for additional investigation, and possible adaptation as a clinical tool.

subject

attention

cognition

decision making

perception

saccade

salience

contributor

Salinas, Emilio (committee chair)

Maier, Joost X (committee member)

Rowland, Benjamin A (committee member)

date

2022-05-24T08:36:12Z (accessioned)

2023-05-23T08:30:14Z (available)

2022 (issued)

degree

Neurobiology & Anatomy (discipline)

embargo

2023-05-23 (terms)

identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/10339/100772 (uri)

language

en (iso)

publisher

Wake Forest University

type

Thesis