SIGNATURE WORK
CONFERENCE & EXHIBITION 2022

There are numerous sensory stimuli that present in the physical world at every instance. Nevertheless, biological organisms can only respond to them selectively because their information processing center has limited capacity to process all simultaneously. Therefore, attention is a precious resource. Over the past few years, accumulated evidence has indicated that attention can be divided into two distinct categories: bottom-up attention and top-down attention. The former refers to the attention completely guided by the inherent properties of external factors such as the saliency of the stimuli. The latter refers to the attention guided by the internal factors peculiar to the individual such as prior experience. Although there have been many efforts devoted to studying the features and mechanisms underlying these two categories of attention, not as much research has investigated the shifting mechanism between them.

In this study, I investigated whether the mechanism that modulates visual attention in monkeys would shift from bottom-up to top-down after repeated naturalistic free viewings. The results indicated that such shifting did occur after the monkey viewed the same content for many times. The analysis of data acquired from three monkeys indicating the same trend that while initially attracted by lower-level features, significant changes of scan paths occur after repeated viewings, which was likely caused by the involvement of the top-down attention. My study added understanding of attention and helped reveal the cognitive mechanisms fundamental to learning and memory.