Sarah Shomstein, Ph.D.

• Professor, Cognitive Neuroscience
• Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences
• Columbian College of Arts & Sciences

Rethinking Attention: Dynamic Prioritization

Decades of research on understanding the mechanisms of attentional selection have focused on identifying the units (representations) on which attention operates in order to guide prioritized sensory processing. In this talk, I will focus on attentional phenomena that are not easily accommodated within current theories of attentional selection – the “attentional platypuses,” as they allude to an observation that within biological taxonomies the platypus does not fit into either mammal or bird categories. Similarly, attentional phenomena that do not fit neatly within current attentional models suggest that current models need to be revised. I list a few instances of the ‘attentional platypuses” and then offer a new approach, the Dynamically Weighted Prioritization, stipulating that multiple factors impinge onto the attentional priority map, each with a corresponding weight.

Faculty Host: Dr. Ed Connor