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Plasticity of the attentive mind| title | Plasticity of the attentive mind |
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| start_date | 2024/05/14 |
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| schedule | 13h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | Lecture Theatre G03 & on Zoom |
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| summary | 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 past learning and future action. 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. |
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| responsibles | Esposito |
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Workflow history| from state (1) | to state | comment | date |
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| submitted | published | | 2024/05/02 13:14 UTC |
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