Good morning SFN! CoCoA lab posters today and tomorrow afternoon. Come by LL20 to chat with @jacobsellers.bsky.social about using fMRI and our forced response task to examine the dynamics of control

On the cover! Let's go @brissend.bsky.social!

Errors of attention adaptively warp spatial cognition
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We found that as attention errors accumulated over the
course of the experiment, participants’ working memory recall dramatically shifted to counteract the attentional error. The timecourse of this adaptation is strikingly similar to observed in saccade and other sensorimotor adaptation paradigms.

We designed a task that repeatedly induced errors in the allocation of spatial attention to a particular location and intermittently measured spatial working memory recall to
assess whether internal spatial representations adaptively shifted to counteract these errors.

It’s clear that this sort of adaptive control is at play for many types of movements including eye movements (e.g., saccade adaptation), but how can you show that cognitive processes might also be subject to these same learning mechanisms?

(Figure from Albert et al., 2012)

James favored the hypothesis that the cerebellum is responsible for adaptive control across a variety of functions as a feedforward controller sensitive to the mismatch between predicted and actual outcomes (see Ito and others).

We show that the typical manipulations affecting conflict tasks (e.g. conflict frequency, distractor salience, etc) are preserved and discuss the distinct advantages of examining the entire speed-accuracy tradeoff function.

This approach allows us to examine accuracy rate as a function of processing time and has the distinct advantage of allowing us to explicitly examine the comission of habitual errors before the goal-directed response has time to override the response (the part of the red curve shaded black below)

We argue for a return to explicitly examining how speed and accuracy tradeoff with one another to gain a deeper understanding of cognitive processing. In the forced-response method (ht @adrianhaith.bsky.social), people must respond at a predetermined time while stimulus processing time is varied

Conflict tasks (Stroop, Flanker, Simon) typically rely on free response times (RT) tasks. They often use the RT difference between congruent and incongruent as an index of interference and the ability to override prepotent responses, but there are long-standing concerns about the use of RT.

Mugs :)

Still extremely surreal this thing is sitting in my office. Feeling extremely grateful to @psychonomicsociety.bsky.social and the folks here at UM who nominated me.

Congrats again to the other early career awardees!
@kimberlychiew.bsky.social @brookemacnamara.bsky.social @amybelfi.bsky.social