November 5

12pm

Carnegie 113

Please join the Cognitive Science Department on Wednesday, November 5th for a presentation titled "Mechanisms of Selective Attention during Learning" by Dr. Brandon Turner of Ohio State University. Dr. Turner is a Professor in the Psychology Department at The Ohio State University and his research interests include dynamic models of cognition and perceptual decision making, efficient methods for performing likelihood-free and likelihood-informed Bayesian inference, and unifying behavioral and neural explanations of cognition.
 

Mechanisms of Selective Attention during Learning
 

Abstract:
Although it is widely accepted that selective attention is a cornerstone of human learning, there is a lack of consensus about the specific mechanisms that drive our ability to selectively attend. In this talk, I take the position that identifying mechanisms of selective attention is complicated by at least three obfuscating factors: (1) it is not typically known, a priori, what goals the learner is trying to solve, (2) the specific memories created during the learning process are rarely taken into account when defining what will be selectively attended next, and (3) selective attention is a learning mechanism that is typically used in addition to other types of underlying learning structures (e.g., associative learning) that often can equally well account for the same data. In this talk, I will discuss three projects that target each of these factors in service of building a more general framework that addresses all of them. The first project focuses on identifying learning goals from eye tracking, choice, and fMRI time series data. The second project focuses on the interactions between selective attention and working memory across the human life span by studying differences between children and younger adults. The third project targets differences between associative and selective attention learning by examining learning profiles of pigeons, rats, and humans.