Denison Scientific Association: Whatcha lookin’ at?: Using eye-tracking to assess attention to the attributes of items used in goal-directed tasks

To make sense of the world, we rely on our ability to organize information about objects, people, and events into meaningful categories and acquire concepts that represent those categories. In the past decade, I have developed a framework for understanding goal-directed concept acquisition. This work has led me to consider how selective attention operates during our interactions with items. My research suggests that selective attention is a necessary, but not sufficient, component of goal-directed learning. It is necessary in that it makes potentially relevant information more available, but not sufficient in and of itself because further processing shapes the acquired knowledge. Over the past few years, I have been incorporating eye tracking into my research. This methodology provides a robust measurement of visual attention and has allowed me to more formally assess the role that selective attention plays in goal-directed concept acquisition. I will discuss the overarching trajectory of this line of research and present recent studies that raise questions about how to best understand the eye-tracking measures as indices of conceptual knowledge.