{"id":15967,"date":"2024-06-20T16:09:48","date_gmt":"2024-06-20T07:09:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wias\/?p=15967"},"modified":"2024-06-20T16:09:57","modified_gmt":"2024-06-20T07:09:57","slug":"%e9%87%8f%e7%9a%84%e3%83%86%e3%82%ad%e3%82%b9%e3%83%88%e5%88%86%e6%9e%90%e3%81%ab%e3%82%88%e3%82%8b%e5%9b%bd%e9%9a%9b%e6%94%bf%e6%b2%bb%e7%a0%94%e7%a9%b6%e3%80%80%e6%b8%a1%e8%be%ba%e8%80%95-12-2-2-5-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wias\/news-en\/2024\/06\/20\/15967\/","title":{"rendered":"Focusing on attention: How do we process unconscious sensory information?
HUNG Shao-Min, Assistant Professor"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

HUNG, Shao-Min, Assistant Professor<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Beyond our grasp<\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n

I am a vision scientist — an experimental psychologist studying consciousness, human vision<\/span> and language.<\/span> I’m interested<\/span> in how we process sensory information around us that is not conscious to us. For example, sometimes we have limited attention, so we can only pay attention to a small amount of information. What about the<\/span> information that is beyond the grasp of our attention<\/span>? <\/span>When information doesn’t<\/span> enter our awareness, what happens to it? Does it influence our behavior?\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The main project I\u2019ve been working on at WIAS is to understand how top-down information or top-down processes affect unconscious information processing. People used to believe that unconscious information processing is just automatic<\/span>, <\/span>somehow triggered by some random process in your head or in the environment. What I’m trying to understand is<\/span>, <\/span>how what we focus on affects such processes.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Neur<\/span>al<\/span> basis of modulation in <\/span>the <\/span>brain<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n

I have some initial work from my postdoc showing that the difficulty of a task<\/span> affects how we process subliminal or unconscious information. I’m also interested in understanding the neural mechanism behind it.<\/span> My collaborators and I scan our participants\u2019<\/span> brains<\/span> to find where the neurological basis of such a potential modulation is in the brain.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m doing this work in collaboration with National Taiwan University. WIAS itself doesn’t have a lab or experimental space, so I collaborate for the behavioral experiments<\/span> with<\/span> Professor Katsumi Watanabe on the Waseda<\/span> campus. For the MRI experiments, I collaborate with Professor<\/span> Brown Hsieh at National Taiwan University.<\/span> I think that’s the core value of WIAS — you’ve got to branch out and collaborate<\/span>.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Gap in the theory<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n

I\u2019ve<\/span> always been interested in perception, <\/span>sensation<\/span> and cognition. <\/span>I<\/span>n psychology we hear a lot of theories about how implicit a lot of information processing <\/span>is<\/span><\/span>, <\/span><\/span>that it is <\/span>automatic<\/span><\/span> and <\/span>beyond our awareness. When I was an <\/span>undergrad<\/span><\/span>,<\/span><\/span> studying awareness or consciousness was not that <\/span>acceptable<\/span><\/span>. <\/span><\/span>P<\/span>eople<\/span><\/span> treat<\/span>ed<\/span> it as an outlier. <\/span>M<\/span>emory<\/span><\/span>, <\/span><\/span>emotion<\/span> and <\/span>psychological disease<\/span>s<\/span><\/span> were<\/span> studied a lot<\/span>. But how we become aware of the sensory world<\/span><\/span> — <\/span><\/span>the attitude is <\/span>that <\/span>it <\/span>is a subject <\/span>fit <\/span>for<\/span> philosophy. But in<\/span><\/span> textbooks or in class, people talked about it a lot without<\/span><\/span> devoting energy or time to study<\/span>ing the <\/span>topic. <\/span>I realized that <\/span>there<\/span> was <\/span>something lacking here.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Real-world applications<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n

Driven by our studies showing interaction between attention and unconscious processes, ultimately, I want to develop a disease model<\/span> to apply to real-world problems<\/span>. <\/span>We have all these hypotheses about how attention is regulated<\/span>, <\/span>and how we process subliminal information around us. We should be able to apply this to specific individuals, like people who have attention deficit disorder, or early<\/span>–<\/span>stage diseases<\/span>.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In our current study, our subjects were older participants, on average 75 to 80 years old<\/span>. <\/span>In our collaborator\u2019s earlier work, an interesting thing is that if you look at how they use their attention with EEG, they actually show some differences, but that isn\u2019t reflected<\/span> in their performance<\/span>\u3000\uff08<\/span>Fig. 1<\/span>\uff09.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

They may be working on the same task, but their strategy of using their attention could be very different. That prompted the beginning of our study. On the surface, judging by their performance, they’re all basically the same, but there may be some implicit deficit going on for people who have a high risk of developing Alzheimer’s.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This could lead to a major indicator that we<\/span> could combine with the well-known biomarkers such as tau or beta amyloid. It might provide another very early biomarker or behavioral marker<\/span> for diseases<\/span>.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"

Fig. 1 Practice makes imperfect.<\/p><\/div>\n

The more practice high-risk individuals have, the more interference they receive. This is our first evidence to suggest that they are using their attention in a very different way, maybe in a pathological way, because the more attention they have, the more they use this attention to process distracting information.<\/p>\n

Probability tracking<\/strong><\/h3>\n

I also study how we track probability unconsciously. For example, when you walk down the street and see a traffic light, it doesn\u2019t just give you a color, it also gives you a probability — it tells you how likely you are to get hit by a car.<\/p>\n

I’m fascinated by how our visual system tracks all this information around us. When you walk on a crossing in Shibuya, there’s no way you can look at all the lights and all the people around you. I’ve been wondering whether we have some sort of subliminal system that helps to track such information, the probability of the information around us, which is also predictive \u2013 it helps us to predict what’s going to happen next.<\/p>\n

Japan connections<\/strong><\/h3>\n

I was happy to be able to come to WIAS. I\u2019ve always liked Japan. I’m fascinated by the culture, and I\u2019ve had a lot of collaborators in Japan because we go to the same conferences and attend the same meetings. I heard some good things about the institute, so I talked to my postdoc supervisor, who is Japanese, and thought maybe this was a good career move to pursue. Things turned out to be great, and I\u2019m enjoying my stay at WIAS very much.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Interviewed and written by Robert Cameron
\nIn cooperation with the M.A. Program in Journalism, Graduate School of Political Science, Waseda University<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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