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. Experimental paradigms
that are currently being explored in the attention research group at Kent are
the attentional blink, rapid serial visual presentation in general and the
Emotional Stroop Effect. In particular, we have developed detailed theoretical
accounts of all 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 the
constraints that govern whether a stimulus is, or is not, perceived. In this
respect, we are particularly evaluating the relationship between encoding into
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 the School of Computing at Kent’s BioSemi EEG
system. There is also the possibility to run functional magnetic resonance
imaging studies through Bowman’s part-time Professorship in the School of
Psychology at the University of Birmingham.