Schedule of Events | Symposia

Choosing When and Where to Attend: Decoding the Electrophysiological Correlates of Self-Paced Willed Attention

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

John Nadra¹ (jnadra@ucdavis.edu), Ava Hutchins¹, Grace Sullivan¹, Sofia Fischel¹, Sreenivasan Meyyappan¹, Mingzhou Ding², George Mangun¹; ¹University of California, Davis, ²University of Florida

Studies of voluntary visual-spatial attention have used attention-directing cues, such as arrows, to instruct observers to focus selective attention on relevant locations in visual space in order to detect subsequent target stimuli. In real-life scenarios, however, voluntary attention is influenced by a host of factors, most of which are quite different from the laboratory paradigms that utilize attention-directing cues. These factors include priming, experience, reward, meaning, motivations, and high-level behavioral goals. Attention that is endogenously directed in the absence of external attention-directing cues has been referred to as willed attention (for a review, see Nadra & Mangun, 2023), where volunteers decide where to attend in response to a prompt to do so. Here, we used a novel paradigm that eliminated external influences (i.e., attention-directing cues and prompts) about where and when spatial attention should be directed. Using machine learning decoding methods, we showed that the well-known lateralization of EEG alpha power during spatial attention was also present during purely self-generated attention. In contrast to prior work on self-paced willed attention (Nadra et al., 2023), the novel paradigm employed here allows for the use of decoding methods to analyze the time course of shifts of self-paced willed attention. By eliminating explicit cues or prompts that affect the allocation of voluntary attention, this work advances our understanding of the neural correlates of attentional control and provides steps toward the development of EEG-based brain-computer interfaces that tap into human intentions.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Spatial