Competition and Cooperation in Memory-Guided Attention

About This Grant

Humans use memories of the past to figure out where to pay attention and what is most relevant to reach their current goals. For example, when driving to work, an individual can use their memory for specific streets to direct their attention to intersections that they know are tricky or dangerous. This process of “memory-guided attention” helps individuals behave efficiently and accurately even if they are in a rush. Memories, however, can be a double-edged sword. Because many street intersections can look similar to one another, confusing one intersection for another can lead to costly mistakes. This project aims to determine how the brain enables humans to minimize confusion between similar memories to direct their attention accurately and precisely. Understanding how memories are used for rapid decisions about where and how to pay attention has implications for education and artificial intelligence models. For educational settings, the project has potential to inform how students can be taught to avoid confusing similar memories of related problems and concepts, which could help students pay attention in the right way at the right time. More broadly, understanding how the brain solves this problem could inspire new ways that artificial intelligence models can be changed to avoid confusing memories for similar events, and to predict human attention more accurately. In addition to the research, this project includes research training and mentoring for high school, undergraduate, and graduate students in cognitive neuroscience. This project’s main focus is to determine how the brain’s memory systems help prevent competition, and promote cooperation, between memories to guide attention. This project focuses on a key brain region that is critical for building new memories and retrieving old ones: the hippocampus. The main prediction is that the hippocampus helps minimize confusion between similar memories by forming differentiated neural representations of them over time, and that this process helps prevent errors in memory-guided attention. This prediction is tested in using multiple methods: functional magnetic resonance imaging, eye tracking, measures of behavioral accuracy and response times, and sophisticated statistical models of brain activity and behavior. The project focuses on memories at different timescales. Aim 1 focuses on memories that were acquired some time ago and retained in long-term memory. Aim 2 examines interactions between these long-term memories and working memories acquired several seconds in the past. In Aim 1, the goal is to determine how the hippocampus prevents similar long-term memories from competing to guide attention. It tests the hypothesis that competition is initially overcome by brain systems involved in effortful control of behavior, with the hippocampus taking over to guide attention with additional experience. In Aim 2, the goal is to determine how working memories and long-term memories may be represented distinctly in the brain and over time in behavior to prevent them from competing with each other and helping them cooperate instead. Together, the overall goal is to uncover the powerful ways that the mind and brain minimize competition and promote cooperation between memories to influence attention. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.