A seminar in the series MaKS Research Seminars will be held on Wednesday 9 March at 12:15 in Room 414 MaKS Building.
Attention, Human Foraging & Individual Differences
Attention, Human Foraging & Individual Differences
Prof. Ian Thornton
Department of Cognitive Science
Department of Cognitive Science
This presentation will begin with a brief introduction to the field of Cognitive Science and the range of research that is being carried out by the Department of Cognitive Science within the Faculty of Media and Knowledge Sciences. There will also be a short “virtual tour” of the facilities within the new Cognitive Science lab. A main theme running through much of Professor Thornton’s research is the way that attention constrains the way we perceive and act. Having provided a working definition of “attention”, Professor Thornton will show some examples of tasks typically used to study attention in the lab and get the audience involved in some simple demonstrations.
The main research project that will be discussed is a collaboration with a team led by Professor Árni Kristjánsson from the University of Iceland. As Professor Kristjánsson will be visiting the Cognitive Science Lab in March, he has kindly agreed to come along and give his own perspective on the project. In this work, a simple iPad app was developed to study the way human participants 'forage' for visual targets. By introducing simple manipulations borrowed from traditional attention research, it was shown that, as with many other species, human foraging behaviour is typically constrained by attention (Kristjánsson, Johannesson & Thornton, PLoS ONE 9(6): e100752, 2014). Specifically, when attentional load is light, people select targets at random. When attention demands are higher most participants radically change the way they behave, foraging with a very particular, systematic style. Interestingly, across a number of experiments, a subset of participants (20%) were identified, who were immune to such manipulations and always foraged randomly. These participants were termed 'super-foragers' as their speed and accuracy remained high and they were able to complete the tasks with less overall effort. The discussion will highlight what these individual differences in foraging style might tell about attention in general and also preview some of the ways the current tasks may be extended to further utilise the capabilities of mobile devices.