Hermann Müller: Handling Visual Distraction

The world is full of stimuli, of which only a tiny fraction is relevant at any time to our action goals. Since this has been so throughout human evolution, the brain has developed adaptive mechanisms of handling distraction by irrelevant stimuli. However, modern societies aggravate the load on these mechanisms by adding ever more attention-grabbing stimuli, from brightly colored warning signals to flashed-up adverts. This raises a set of pressing questions, which are also central to understanding attentional selectivity in general: How well do people manage to ignore all these sources of distraction and maintain focus on the tasks at hand (avoiding the potentially harmful consequences of temporary inattention or attentional misallocations)? What are the neuro-cognitive mechanisms underlying efficient distractor handling? How might these be compromised in individuals vulnerable to distraction (e.g., in children, older adults, certain neurological/psychiatric disorders)? The answers have tremendous applied (as well as societal) implications, ranging from the safe design of advanced technical (e.g., augmented-reality) environments that avoid over-challenging attentional selectivity through therapeutic interventions in especially distraction-prone clinical populations to optimizing our capacity to cope with distraction through perceptual learning.

The focus of the CAS Research Group "Handling Visual Distraction" will be on the fundamental mechanisms of distractor handling, in particular, two issues at the heart of current debates:

various cognitive control mechanisms, and their interplay, of shielding our cognitive system against distraction, and
the role of statistical learning (the incidental extraction and use of regularities in the environment) for mitigating the interference caused by distractors