VISSATO · Visual Search and Cognitive Control of the Speed-Accuracy Trade-off
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2018-09-01 → 2021-08-31
- EU contribution
- €195,455
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Visual Search and Cognitive Control of the Speed-Accuracy Trade-off
The visual environment contains many objects, yet only a few of them are behaviourally relevant. How we find relevant objects is a longstanding question in cognitive psychology. Research on selective visual attention has made tremendous progress in this area over the last forty years or so, underpinned by the visual search paradigm. In a visual search task, participants are asked to find a target among non-target objects on a computer screen. It is now well established that a set of basic visual features are initially extracted, prior to further scene analysis for relevant objects. Importantly, the accuracy of target-selection in visual experiments is subject to speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT), i.e. we are more likely to miss a target if we respond quickly. We exert a high degree of control over this trade-off, i.e. whether we favour speed over accuracy or vice versa, depending on our motivation. Such flexibility is believed to have been important for human survival, but nonetheless, little research has been conducted on how this control is exerted over visual search, much less its neural bases. With a focus on motion stimuli, we set out to develop a computational model of cognitive control for visual search, and to test the model's predictions for neural activity and behaviour under speed and accuracy emphasis.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The visual environment in our daily life contains many objects, yet only a few of them are relevant for our behavior. In recentdecades, our understanding of how we are able to find relevant objects has made substantial progress, in terms of bothbehaviour and its underlying neural basis. This progress is mainly based on the visual search paradigm where participantsare asked to find a target object among non-target objects on a computer screen. Despite this progress, an important aspectof visual search has been neglected, the cognitive control of the ubiquitous speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT, i.e. we are likelyto miss targets if we aim for fast responses). We can exert this control depending on many factors (e.g. motivation,situational context, etc.) and its flexibility undoubtedly contributed to our survival as a species. Despite this importance, fewstudies have investigated cognitive control of SAT in visual search. VISSATO aims to close this gap by employing a set ofhighly interdisciplinary research lines with experimental and computational modeling techniques. VISSATO will also draw onrecent progress on SAT in the related field of perceptual decision making. This field typically examines how we makedecisions about perceptual characteristics of single objects (e.g. the motion direction of noisy motion patterns). VISSATO willdevelop a novel visual search task which allows us to tap into cognitive control of SAT and conduct EEG studies with thistask. VISSATO will also develop novel biophysical models of these experiments, testing different hypotheses about thecontrol mechanisms. Using the latest advances in Bayesian model evaluation (including EEG source reconstruction)VISSATO will determine which of these novel models best explains the empirical data, thereby providing strong evidence onhow the cognitive control of SAT in the processing of visual scenes is implemented in the brain.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM · BirminghamCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union