JooHyun Song: 2018 Psychonomic Society Leading Edge Workshop

"Paradoxical Modulation of Motor Actions by Attention"
JooHyun Song, Brown University, USA
Abstract: Vision is crucial not only for recognizing objects, but also for guiding actions. Most real-world visual scenes are complex and crowded with many different objects competing for attention and action. In order to efficiently guide motor actions, the visual system must be capable of selecting one object as the target of the current action, while suppressing the wealth of other irrelevant possibilities. It is generally accepted that more perceptually salient stimuli are able to attract attention automatically and thus are more disruptive to behavior than weakly salient distractors. Yet, counter intuitively, we recently discovered dissociable effects of salience on perception and action: while highly salient stimuli interfere strongly with perceptual processing, increased physical salience or associated value attenuates action-related interference. Thus, this result suggests the existence of salience-triggered suppression mechanisms specific to goal-directed actions. Furthermore, we observed that attentional distraction does not impair the original learning of a simple visuomotor rotational adaptation task. Paradoxically, successful recall of the visuomotor skill only occurs when a similar level of attentional distraction is present. This finding suggests that performing a distractor task acts as an internal ‘attentional context’ for encoding and retrieving of motor memory. Therefore without consideration of internal task contexts in real-life situations, the success of learning and rehabilitation programs may be undermined. Taken together, understanding integrated attention-action systems provides new insights into our seamlessly interaction with a complex external world.