Yuhong Jiang

Department of Psychology, Harvard University

The world surrounds us with a constant flux of visual information. How do we maintain a stable sense of the surroundings, and how do we decide where to look? My talk covers two mechanisms that help solve these problems: attentive tracking and spatial context learning.  I argue that these mechanisms place different demands on attention. In Attentive tracking, performance declines when more targets must be tracked and when the targets move faster. However, brain imaging data show that different types of attention are engaged for indexing more targets and for faster updating. In spatial context learning, learning of repeated search context proceeds largely automatically, independent of selective attention and visual working memory.