Speaker: Jan Theeuwes

Fellow, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences

Professor, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

【Time】 Monday, March 31, 2025, 15:00
【Location】  Lecture Hall 415, Building 3, Hainayuan, Zijingang Campus

This presentation outlines a neurocognitive framework of attentional control grounded in the dynamic interplay between top-down goals, bottom-up salience, and selection history. Drawing on recent behavioral, EEG, and fMRI findings, we demonstrate how selection history exerts a continuous influence on attentional deployment by modulating weights within a spatial priority map. This map integrates multiple sources of information to guide covert and overt attention in a context-sensitive manner. Regions previously associated with relevant stimuli are up-regulated, while areas linked to frequent distraction are down-regulated. We argue that attentional selection reflects a competitive process shaped not only by immediate task demands and stimulus properties but also by the adaptive weighting of past experiences, offering a more comprehensive understanding of the neural dynamics underlying visual attention.