Speaker: Dr. Xun He Senior Lecturer in Psychology Department of Psychology, Faculty of Science and Technology Bournemouth University

Time: 2017-12-20 13:00 - 14:00

Venue: Room 1115， Wang Kezhen Building

Abstract: In this talk, I will summarise my research on attention performance in co-acting dyads. Humans often pay attention to the same information source in the environment along with other individuals who perform similar tasks (e.g., students pay attention to the same lecturer during a lecture). It has been shown that one person’s attention allocation can be guided by the knowledge about another person’s working memory (He et al., 2011, 2014). Our recent research removed the memory component, and focused on shared attention performance in dyads. We found that that people’s attention performance is reduced when two persons paid attention to the same spatial location in relative to the condition where two persons attended to different locations. This effect, interestingly, was diminished by the other person’s task load and ingroup status of the dyads. To study the neural underpinnings of this attention reduction effect, an EEG study was also carried out. For the shared attention condition (relative to the unshared attention condition), the ERP results showed an enhancement of attention effect in the P1 component, along with a reduction of attention effect in the N2b component. With time-frequency analysis, a weaker alpha-reduction in EEG was also found contralateral to the attended locations over posterior sites after 200ms. These data suggested that the attention performance is enhanced at the sensory level, but then turned into a reduction by top-down cognitive control.