Effects of Divided Attention for Space and Features

Abstract

To cope with the multitude of stimuli in the world, our visual system selectively attends to the pertinent locations or features in our environment, and while not all available information is relevant, it is common at a given moment for there to be more than a single element of interest. What are the behavioral and neural consequences in these cases of divided attention? The experiments described in this dissertation combine careful progressions of psychophysical tasks and fMRI to examine three broad questions (1) Is there always a cost to performance in divided attention tasks? (2) What are the cognitive processes that are limited under conditions of divided attention? 3) How does dividing attention across features at different spatial locations affect neural responses in visual cortex as measured by fMRI?