Global States and Cognitive Priority Control

Optimal human behavior in many life-critical tasks requires prioritizing, attending, encoding, and remembering relevant information while ignoring other distracting sources of information. Prioritization affects the neural coding of information and consequently performance on attention, memory, and decision-making tasks. The fundamental goal of this project is to understand optimal human performance via the neurobiological mechanisms that mediate the interaction between global behavioral states and the neural mechanisms that mediate cognitive priority control. 

With a goal of augmenting human performance and capacity to increase situational awareness as well as lighten physical and cognitive workloads, an emphasis is placed on basic science efforts devoted to the understanding of the basic mechanisms that support situational awareness, including cognitive priority control, and how those mechanisms are impacted by changes in physical and cognitive workloads. Achieving this understanding is the sole focus of this project. Moreover, this work is grounded in the empirical rigor of our previous ICB-funded work demonstrating that a) changes in physical state can influence multiple stages of information processing and brain activity and b) motivational states manipulated via rewards can selectively enhance visual search performance and neural activity when task-relevant information is prioritized, but degrade performance when these states prioritize task-irrelevant information.