What to expect when you are not expecting it: How implicit regularities drive attentional selection

ongoing

"Extracting statistical regularities from the environment is one of the most fundamental abilities of any living organism. This type of learning is largely unconscious, unintentional, and implicit; it runs ""in the background"", both seeking and giving structure to the world around us; making it coherent, predictable and quickly manageable. Even though a lot is known about how statistical learning affects language acquisition, object recognition, motor learning, and decision making, only recently it became apparent that it plays a key role in attentional selection. Visual perception must be selective, as we are confronted with the massive amount of available sensory input. Statistical learning occurring often beneath the level of awareness provides structure to the environment uncovering the relations between objects in space and time. The proposed research program investigates the mechanisms underlying visual statistical learning (VSL) focusing on how, when and what information is extracted by the visual system. Through brain imaging we seek to understand how learning taking place in the medial temporal lobe (hippocampus), affects attentional representations within putative priority maps across the visual hierarchy. By means of EEG, we seek to connect hippocampal activity to the activations within the spatial priority map which ultimately controls attentional selection. By means of single cell recording in humans we determine at a cell level how statistical learning develops over time. To understand the mechanism, we analyse individual differences in VSL and relate this to visual working memory capacity and attentional selection in psychopathy. The proposed research will have a large impact on the study of cognition, learning, and memory. "