Abstract
Being able to selectively attend to stimuli is essential for any agent operating in noisy environments. Humans have developed, or are inherently equipped, with mechanisms to do so; these mechanisms are a rich source of debate. Here, we contribute to it by building a functional model to describe the findings of an existing psychophysiological experiment demonstrating how early and late saccades as well as “conscious report” are affected by varying levels of cognitive load. The model adheres to the established principles of neurophysiology. In a task focused on the monitoring of moving stimuli, where objects usually move predictably but randomly deviate from it every 0.2 s, change in cognitive load is reflected in the proportion of late saccades and behavioural reports in response to the task. It also provides evidence that the physiological structure of the brain is capable of implementing selective attention using a method other than the attentional spotlight.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank all members of the SPECS group for their input during discussions, with a special mention for: Jordi-Ysard Puigbò, Riccardo Zucca and Clément Moulin-Frier.
This work is supported by the EU FP7 project WYSIWYD (FP7-ICT-612139).
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Low, S.C., van Wijngaarden, J.B.G., Verschure, P.F.M.J. (2016). Modelling the Effect of Cognitive Load on Eye Saccades and Reportability: The Validation Gate. In: Lepora, N., Mura, A., Mangan, M., Verschure, P., Desmulliez, M., Prescott, T. (eds) Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems. Living Machines 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9793. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42417-0_47
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42417-0_47
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