We are what we attend to: Individual differences in attention and personality

As the gatekeeper of conscious awareness, visual attention plays a formative role in how and what we experience. Visual attention is influenced by a cluster of exogenous (e.g., visual onsets and motion) and endogenous factors (e.g., goals, desires), which work in tandem to influence how visual attention is calibrated in terms of spatial scope (spatial spread) and selectivity (biased enhancement of relevant and suppression of irrelevant information). While the influence of exogenous factors on visual attention has been studied widely, the relationship between endogenous factors, such as personality, and visual attention is less clear. There has been some work exploring the relationship between attention and personality, but this field of interdisciplinary work lacks a unifying theory that operationalizes these relationships. The aim of this thesis is to propose such a guiding framework, the Attention and Personality Framework, and demonstrate how this framework can provide insight into individual differences in visual processing. This framework suggests visual attention is related to specific personality traits. Specifically, Conscientiousness is related to the selectivity of attention, while Openness is related to the spatial scope of attention. The experiments in this thesis provide evidence supporting this hypothesis and demonstrate the utility of this guiding framework. In particular, performance on a task probing the spatial scope of visual attention is predicted by Openness (Inhibition of Return, Chapter 2), while performance on a task probing the selectivity of attention is predicted by Conscientiousness (Localized Attentional Interference, Chapter 3). Further, these relationships are evident in other forms of visual processing that rely on visual attention, such as iconic memory (Chapter 4) and visual working memory (Chapter 5). Taken together, this thesis provides a framework that refines our understanding of individual differences in visual cognition and personality and demonstrates its utility in visual cognition and personality research.Ph.D