Effect of Action-Effect Association on Modulation of Attentional Capture in Aiming Movements

The purpose of this project is to determine if associations between actions and their effects can modulate attention capture. This goal will be achieved by measuring reaction time interference and monitoring eye movements while participants reach towards targets in the presence of a distractor. Participants will reach towards targets that are onset (appearance) or offset (disappearance) events in the presence of offset or onset distractors, respectively. This task will be done both before and after completing a session where participants will execute a series of free-choice reaching movements to targets that will disappear once they touch them. This phase should elicit a novel action-effect association between reaching movements (action) and offset events (effects). It is hypothesized that following training there will be increased distraction caused by offset events. These findings will indicate how associations between actions and effects drive attentional capture and may be useful in developing new human-computer interfaces.

Faculty Supervisor:

Timothy Welsh

Student:

Partner:

Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar

Discipline:

Life Sciences

Sector:

Education

University:

University of Toronto

Program: