Mental Processes Underlying Attention, Visual Perception, and Cognitive Control, Pt 1 - Mind & Life Institute

Dialogue 18|Session 4

Overview

Attention is a fuzzy concept that we try to capture in a variety of forms to study it in the lab. The main meaning is the selection of relevant information when the mind is overloaded or distracted. One dimension along which attention can vary is from sharply focused to broadly spread. Each setting may yield different information, from the detailed structure of an object with focused attention to the gist of a scene with more global attention. One set of experimental findings suggest a conclusion that is not easily available to introspection: this is that focused attention plays a role in binding features (like shape, color, or motion) to form integrated objects in visual perception. It prevents mistakes like seeing a blue shirt when the person is actually wearing a green shirt and blue pants. A similar function may be shown in higher level conceptual thinking, where attention is needed to create and hold more complex ideas in mind and in working forms of memory.

Is the role of attention limited to conscious perception and thought, leaving a whole complex set of implicit processes unaffected, or are there limits and controls also on what goes on unconsciously? Many recent studies of both normal people and patients with brain damage, for instance, have shown that our behavior and brains can be affected by cues in the environment of which we are quite unaware. Can access to unconscious information become easier through training in meditation? What other effects can meditation training have on attention? We took some standard tests from Western psychology and made some preliminary studies of experienced meditators, testing whether meditation could change the breadth of focus, the efficiency of focus, the overall capacity of attention, or the ability to move between different levels of processing. Our preliminary results suggest that the significant effects have been mainly on the higher levels of perception, where there is more flexibility. We found little evidence that meditation changed access to earlier sensory levels. Do these results accord well with what the outcomes of these meditation practices are?

Dialogue 18
14 sessions
April 7, 2009
Dharamsala, Himachal Pradesh, India
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Speakers

Anne Treisman is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton University. She has two B.A. degrees from Cambridge, England, in Modern Languages and in Natural Sciences, Psychology, and a D. Phi I. degree in Psychology from Oxford. Her main area of research has been on selective attention, starting with studies of selective listening, ("the cocktail party problem" or how we can focus on one voice among two or more), and then turning to visual attention and object perception, particularly the "binding.problem". Other interests have been in the integration of information in the perception of moving objects; perceptual learning; visual memory for objects and events; and in the brain mechanisms underlying these perceptual, attentional and memory functions. She has been elected to the Royal Society, London, the National Academy, USA, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and has received the following awards: -Killam Senior Fellowship, James McKeen Cattell Sabbatical Award; Howard Crosby Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists; Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association; Fellow of American Psychological Society; Golden Brain award of the Minerva Foundation (for "fundamental breakthroughs that extend our knowledge of vision and the brain").

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