We are working to illuminate the nature and function of attentional (dys)regulation in mental health; and to translate these insights to novel therapeutic interventions

Attention is an emergent property of the competition for cognitive processing resources that functions to select and modulate the processing of information most relevant to adaptation in the moment. Across disciplinary and thought traditions, understanding attention has long been thought as fundamental to illuminating the workings of mental life and health. Accordingly, our lab’s work has challenged decades-old assumptions of the field about attention (dys)regulation in mental health, how it is measured and studied, and how to therapeutically target it. First, we proposed a novel way to conceptualize, measure and quantify biased attentional processing – as a dynamic process, expressed from moment-to-moment in real-time; and linked these dynamic features of attentional dysregulation to the etiology and maintenance of multiple prevalent forms of mental ill health. We then translated these insights to a novel experimental intervention technology – Attention Feedback Awareness and Control Training (A-FACT) – to modify biased attentional processing as it unfolds from moment to moment in real-time. A-FACT is designed to train meta-awareness and thereby control over typically unmonitored and involuntary (attentional) habits of our mind’s eye that sub-serve prevalent forms of mental ill health. By challenging decades-old first principles of the paradigm used to study of attention, emotion and mental health, our research has led to field-wide scientific debate and extensive new scholarship.

Second, in contrast to external (e.g., visual) attention, it has long been thought to be nearly impossible to have the type of experimental control over internal stimuli (e.g., thoughts) that is part and parcel to the controlled study of external attention; and thereby, the methodological capacity needed to make direct empirical inferences about unfolding internal attentional processes. We have recently developed the Simulated Thoughts Paradigm (STP) – a promising cognitive-experimental paradigm permitting direct empirical measurement and thereby rigorous experimental study of internal attentional processing. The novel paradigm involves experimental (bone-transduced auditory) delivery of idiographic thought content in a way that is designed to trick brain source localization and elicit the phenomenology of a sense of authorship and identification with the thought stimuli that we experimentally control and deliver. Our initial findings using the STP implicate critical features of internal attentional dysregulation in cognitive vulnerability and prevalent mental health problems and symptoms. We have also recently completed testing of an internal A-FACT intervention technology designed to train meta-awareness of and control over dysregulated internal attentional processing of one’s own thoughts.