NACS Seminar: Dr. Kirsten Adam (Rice University)

Trial-by-trial dynamics of attention and working memory

We can attend to and remember just a subset of information in busy visual environments. Thus, to understand how we coherently navigate the world, we need to understand the factors that guide the allocation of our limited resources. Typically, we measure attention and working memory by averaging across trials, but in this talk, I will show how trial-by-trial dynamics are critically important for understanding these central questions in visual cognition. The first part of the talk will address how attentional selection is impacted by our constantly changing environment. For example, our recent experiences with stimuli in our environment shape the neural “priority maps” that guide our attention. The second part of the talk will address the relationship between fluctuations of attention and working memory. My work has shown how working memory performance fluctuates from trial to trial, and differences in consistency, rather than capacity per se, better explain individual differences in working memory ability. Together, these findings illustrate the importance of both internal and external sources of trial-to-trial variation for understanding attention and working memory.

Dr. Kirsten Adam is an Associate Professor at Rice University.

Dr. William Hodos NACS Seminars are free and open to the public.