Hauptinhalt

FB Kolloq WS24: Chiara della Libera

„Experience-dependent adjustments of Visual Selective Attention”

Veranstaltungsdaten

Prof. Dr. Chiara della Libera, University of Verona, Italy
„Experience-dependent adjustments of Visual Selective Attention”

Within cognitive functions, Visual Selective Attention has a paramount role in allowing an efficient and purposeful interaction with our surrounding environment. At any moment, among the multitude of objects and possibilities available, we necessarily must select those that need to be prioritized, and acted upon, while disregarding other less crucial and possibly interfering information. Visual attention carries out such filtering among visual stimuli, following control signals that have been traditionally thought to depend either on endogenous, volitional factors (i.e., whether the object is in line with current behavioral goals), or on exogenous, stimulus-related features (i.e., whether the object is perceptually salient). 
The evidence collected in the last 15 years brought about a new conception of visual selective attention, which highlights the remarkable role of past experiences in controlling attentional deployment. Visual objects can be associated with a higher or lower attentional priority depending on their familiarity, on the frequency with which they have been attended or ignored, as well as on the desirability of the outcomes obtained when dealing with them in the past.
Although the mechanisms specifically involved in such experience-dependent effects are still under investigation, the evidence suggests that learning determines lasting adjustments of the attentional priority of visual stimuli, perhaps changing their neural representation. In this talk I will illustrate some of the results that initially shed light on such adaptive features of visual selective attention, and new data providing evidence on the possible visuo-spatial representations affected by experience-dependent adjustments.