Item Details

title

Revealing the interactions between exogenous and endogenous control during urgent decision making

author

Goldstein, Allison Taylor

abstract

The decision of where to look next is guided by a combination of current sensory stimuli and internally defined goals. The latency and target of saccadic eye movements are determined by the relative potency, congruence, and timing of these distinct attentional guides. Urgent variants of pro- and anti-saccade tasks can provide a detailed mechanistic account of how these factors interact to dictate saccadic choices. Because of time pressure, performance in urgent task designs varies sharply with cue viewing time (i.e., raw processing time, rPT), and this yields a psychometric function with the temporal precision essential to resolving the contributions of distinct attentional influences as they unfold in time. Chapters II and III utilize multiple urgent saccade task designs to characterize the interactions between exogenous (stimulus-driven) and endogenous (goal-driven) components of spatial attention during perceptual decision making. Chapter II examines how and when the congruency between exogenous and endogenous signals determines pro- (congruent) and anti-saccade (incongruent) performance. These data support the theory that exogenous and endogenous attention act independently and at different times during the decision process. In Chapter III, multiple experimental conditions independently manipulated stimulus salience and endogenously defined task rules to further delineate when and how rapidly each of these signals can steer a saccadic choice. These results indicate that while endogenous goals cannot inhibit exogenously-driven capture, deploying endogenous attention prior to the cue speeds the process by about 30 ms. This implicates a weak, but necessary coupling between attentional deployment and oculomotor planning. Chapter IV examines the broader complement of attention mechanisms that act during natural visual scanning. Analyses focus on whether the characteristic interactions between exogenous and endogenous attention found in Chapter II and III hold up when tested in a more naturalistic, dynamic, and gamified task environment. Results support the conclusion that even under dynamic conditions, top-down and bottom-up attentional mechanisms remain independent and time-dissociated, though differences are noted between performance in trial-based and dynamic tasks. Together, these results offer a more detailed view of the specific interactions between mechanisms of spatial attention while resolving urgent perceptual decisions.

subject

Attention

Cognition

Decision making

Human subjects

Psychophysics

contributor

Salinas, Emilio (advisor)

Laurienti, Paul J (committee member)

Rowland, Benjamin A (committee member)

Maier, Joost (committee member)

Hugenschmidt, Christina E (committee member)

date

2024-05-23T08:36:27Z (accessioned)

2024-05-23T08:36:27Z (available)

2024 (issued)

degree

Neurobiology & Anatomy (discipline)

identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/10339/109462 (uri)

language

en (iso)

publisher

Wake Forest University

type

Dissertation