| Abstract: | The Banff Annual Seminar in Cognitive-Science (BASICS) was founded in 1982 and has met each spring since then in Banff, Alberta, Canada. BASICS was originated to provide an informal atmosphere for the in-depth discussion of a wide variety of research topics within the broadly defined domain of cognitive science. The purpose of the present paper is to summarize and find commonalties among the individual abstracts which follow. The first speaker, Norman Brown began his talk with the premise that a valid model of the estimation process is essential to an understanding of the process of encoding and representing event frequency. In the second talk, John Duncan continued the theme as to how psychological processes are selected according to the current demands of behaviour. The third talk of the first day of the conference was by Nancy Kanwisher. This investigator has been in the forefront of the journals lately for her work with the phenomenon known as repetition blindness (RB). The final talk of the first day of BASICS was given by one of the most prominent figures in the study of visual attention, Anne Treisman. The first talk of the second day of the conference was given by Tom Carr. Carr's talk was aimed at understanding the process by which new information is integrated into the semantic memory system. The last talk of the conference was by Robert Rafal whose work examines the neuropsychological aspects of visual attention. The emerging theme of this year's conference, that humans exercise strategic control over attentional mechanisms, was addressed by all the speakers in a way that proved highly informative. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
