| Abstract: | The Banff Annual Seminar in Cognitive Science (BASICS) was founded in 1982, and thus the meeting this past May marks the 14th anniversary of this conference. Many recent talks have stressed the importance of studying these processes in conjunction with each other. In keeping with this theme, the focus of BASICS 1995 was on recent neuropsychological, neurophysiological, and behavioural findings with respect to attention and learning. Further, many of the talks provided evidence in support of attentional organization centered around objects, rather than locations. The first talk, from world-renowned scientist Michael Posner, centered on his work involving neuroscientific approaches to the study of high-level skills such as reading. Steven Luck's talk also emphasized the use of multiple neurophysiological techniques to study high-level cognitive function, in this case, the binding of features. The talk by Lynn Robertson about her work in collaboration with Anne Treisman, switched to a focus on neuropsychological, rather than neurophysiological, findings regarding attention in humans. The last speaker of the first afternoon, Patrick Cavanagh, gave a talk replete with impressive visual demonstrations regarding his work in the behavioural analysis of spatial visual attention. The first speaker of the following morning session, Jeremy Wolfe, began his presentation by comparing his theory of visual search, which he calls Guided Search, to the more traditional theory of search, Feature Integration Theory (FIT), as proposed by Anne Treisman. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
