The Master in Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience invites to the CIMCYC Talks "Plasticity of the attentive mind" with Dr. Heleen Slagter, researcher from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Abstract
Selective attention is often conceptualized as a mental spotlight that can be directed at will to illuminate any item of interest, acting as a sensory filter that selectively gates goal-relevant information for higher-order processing and conscious representation. Yet, over the past decade or so, it has become clear that our brains continuously predict what sensory signals are likely informative for goal-directed behavior based on the statistics of past agent-environment interactions, and hence, that action-oriented probabilistic learning is a much more pervasive feature of selective attention than generally assumed. In this talk, I will first present findings from several behavioral and EEG studies that reveal how, at the neural level, such probabilistic learning rapidly structures attention: what we automatically attend to or ignore. I will then discuss more recent work suggesting that these attentional biases may be sensorimotor in nature, rendering attention habit-like in character, and that internal attention (in working memory) is similarly structured by action-oriented learning. Finally, I will discuss the idea that attention training as cultivated by meditation may provide a method to unlearn to attend or mentally behave in habitual ways. Altogether the work presented in this talk suggests a reconsideration of how attention is typically approached: from a mere sensory filter to a relational process that optimizes agent-environment interactions based on past experiences.