08:30 - 10:00
Tue-B16-Talk IV-
Tue-Talk IV-
Room: B16
Chair/s:
Jan Tünnermann, Adriana L Ruiz-Rizzo, Ingrid Scharlau
Bundesen’s Theory of Visual Attention (TVA) has been around for approximately half a century. Its basic idea is that visual perception is biased competition of visual categorizations that race visual short-term memory. The biases stem from attentional and perceptual influences. TVA links observable data to theoretical concepts with mathematical rigor and helps to explain phenomena with quantitatively precise concepts. Progress in TVA might not be fast, but it is continuous and robust. This symposium covers recent developments in topics of basic and applied research. In the first session, Scharlau & Tünnermann survey recent advances with new stimuli and recording
settings. Connecting to this, Biermeier & Scharlau investigate attention capacity in mixed-reality settings. Poth & Schneider disentangle the speed of location and object processing. Tünnermann et al. show how simulations of visual foraging depend on dynamically adjusting spatial attention, and Blurton et al. discuss improvements in modeling cognitive control. The second session focuses on recent applications of TVA in clinical contexts: Ruiz-Rizzo et al. present the relationship between visual processing speed and cognitive complaints in older adults. Kattlun et al. investigate the role of visual-short-term memory in cognitive deficits of patients who survived severe sepsis. Martin et
al. demonstrate how fatigue relates to visual processing speed and pupillary unrest in post-COVID patients. Srowig et al. close by showing how visual short-term memory is associated with neuropsychological performance in patients at a high-risk for dementia.
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Using TVA to model cognitive control
Tue-B16-Talk IV-05
Presented by: Steven Blurton
Steven Blurton, Anders Petersen, Signe Vangkilde
Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen
We have recently developed an extension to TVA that makes the theory applicable to response times (RT) based tasks. In this talk, we present results from applying a TVA-based RT model to data obtained in a Simon task. The Simon task is a simple perceptual decision task that requires cognitive control to supress task-irrelevant location information and solve response conflicts. We review some of the various models and theoretical accounts which have been proposed to explain performance in the Simon task, and present a new, TVA-based response time model designed to explain RT distributions, delta curves, and sequence effects. This model can explain the typical negative going delta curves with the assumption of a mixture of TVA parameters, an assumption we derived from the Executive Control Theory of Visual Attention (ecTVA, Logan & Gordon, 2001, Psychological Review). For all model evaluations, we present newly collected data from an extended version of the Simon task. The increased number of trials in the task improved the estimates of RT distribution and also allowed us to analyse learning effects during this task. Our results support the notion that learning decreases the typical RT effects in a Simon task. All results are discussed from a model-based perspective in terms of the TVA-based model. We conclude by considering the scopes and limitations of our approach and applications to other experimental paradigms typically used to assess cognitive control.
Keywords: Cognitive control, visual attention, response time modeling
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