Issues on Visual Attention

This course is designed for graduate students in the field of cognitive psychology. The topic for discussion is attention, especially issues related to visual perception. Topics include the selection based of attention (space, object, feature, or part), the characteristics of visual spatial attention (distribution, movement, split or not), the relationship between attentional capture and visual stimuli, inattentional blindness, repetition blindness, attentional blink, change blindness, the physiological mechanism of attention, and the relationship of attention and eye movement. Students who take this course are required to read papers, report the contents, comment and discuss in class with other students. The aim of the course is to finish a research or review project in a year. To fulfill this goal, the reading of first semester will be mainly exploratory, and will focus on a specific subject in the second semester. Students are expected to design and execute their experiments in the second semester. The grade is based on the performance of weekly reading, discussion, presentation and complete research report.