A wealth of evidence for the automaticity of perceptual organization processes points toward the existence of a global-to-local processing bias in early perceptual stages. Global features are encoded and spontaneously reported during early conscious vision, resulting in the perception of coherent objects prior to identifying detailed information. Yet, results from experiments that presented illusory figure presentation below the perceptual threshold to study the reliance of perceptual organization on visual awareness have shown conflicting findings, leaving open the question of how global features interact during figure perception. The present study will examine the interaction between symmetry and perceptual completion under conditions of restricted awareness.

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Orienting to a novel event is a rapid shift in attention to a change in one’s surroundings that appears to be a fundamental biological mechanism for survival and essentially functions as a “what is it” detector. Orienting appears to play a central role in human learning and development, as it facilitates adaptation to an ever-changing environment. Thus, orienting can be viewed as an allocational mechanism in which attention sifts through the complex multi-sensory world and selects relevant stimuli for further processing. The selection of stimuli for further processing has implications for what will be encoded into memories and how strong those memory traces will be. The ability to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant input, to inhibit the processing of irrelevant stimuli, and to sustain attention requires control, and inhibitory processes that improve with age.

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All complex behaviors require animals to coordinate their perception and actions. To successfully achieve a goal, a decision maker (DM; be it a human, animal, or artificial agent) must determine which action to take and, faced with much more information than she can fully process, must decide which source of information to consult to best guide that action. But in contrast with natural tasks, traditional research has focused primarily on action selection but eschewed the process of information demand. We aim to fill this gap by investigating the factors that motivate people to become curious and seek information. We are collecting behavioral data from a large sample of participants on a battery of online tasks testing various aspects of curiosity, and seek a DSI scholar who can quantitatively analyze the data. The scholar will be supervised by two co-PIs: Jacqueline Gottlieb, in Columbia’s Neuroscience Department and Zuckerman Institute, and Vince Dorie, in the DSI. The scholar will obtain training with advanced data analytic methods and the opportunity to co-author what is expected to be a high impact paper with interdisciplinary appeal in economics, neuroscience, and psychology.

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The introduction of a new technology provides individuals and organizations with a large, unowned, and limitless space for communication and organization. How do individuals use or misuse this space in their decision making? Using online discussion platforms, we will analyze what types of discussions thrive - those with depth of discussion or topical complexity or those with cohesive contours? We’ll ask, are there high status actors who are particularly good at recognizing topic gaps which need new conversations? Using social psychological theories with a large-scale archival dataset, we’ll learn more about the impact of new technologies on group decision-making processes.

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