At any moment humans are bombarded with more sensory information than they can be aware of. Selective attentional filters allow us to sift the wheat from the chaff in relation to our goals. One important factor in tuning such filters is the “affective/motivational salience,” or emotional relevance, of a stimulus. But what type of object or event is most salient in any situation differs greatly between individuals as a result of both genetic inheritance and life experience. Moreover, attention may be tuned in distinct ways by emotional arousal, memory, familiarity, or by ownership or possession, and can depend on both short-term and long term goals. The goal of this program of research is to better understand how different people come to prioritize attention to specific aspects of the world over time in different circumstances, and the brain systems that facilitate these dynamically shifting maps of attention.
