Humans are very
good at prioritising competing processing demands. In particular, perception of
a salient environmental event can interrupt ongoing processing, causing
attention, and accompanying processing resources, to be redirected to the new
event. A classic example of this is the well-known Cocktail Party Effect. Not only
are we easily able to follow just one conversation when several people are
speaking, but the occurrence of a salient phrase in a peripheral conversation
stream, such as somebody mentioning our name, causes auditory attention to be
redirected. It is also clear that emotions, motivation and physiological state
in general, play a key role in such prioritisation.
Through the
combination of behavioural experimentation and the recent application of brain
imaging, modern cognitive neuroscience is starting to clarify the mechanisms
that underlie human deployment of attention. In particular, a number of
experimental paradigms have started to reveal how timing constraints and
sensitivity to salient events are reconciled in humans. Two experimental
paradigms that are currently being explored in the attention research group at
Kent are the attentional blink and the Emotional Stroop Effect. In particular,
we have developed detailed theoretical accounts of both these phenomena.
The proposed PhD
will undertake experimental studies targeted at evaluating a number of key
predictions arising from our theoretical accounts of these phenomena. Many of
these predictions focus on the nature of human conscious perception and what
the constraints are, which govern whether a stimulus is, or is not, perceived.
In this respect, we are particularly evaluating the relationship between
encoding in working memory and conscious perception.
The proposed
experimental methods are traditional behavioural experimentation and
electrophysiological work (i.e. EEG and ERP recording). The latter of these
will be performed using a, recently installed, EEG recording facility. There is
also the possibility of involvement in functional magnetic imaging studies
through our collaboration with the Emotion group at the Medical Research
Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge.