Attention influences nearly every aspect of daily life, from remembering information and solving problems to navigating distractions and shifting between tasks. Yet researchers are increasingly finding that attention is not simply about maintaining focus.
Nicholaus Brosowsky, a cognitive psychologist and an associate professor in the U of M’s department of psychology, studies attention and the cognitive processes that shape how people interact with the world around them. His research examines how attention works alongside memory, task switching and mental well-being, while increasingly using immersive technologies to recreate everyday situations in the laboratory.
Brosowsky’s lab, recently renamed the Immersive Cognition Lab, investigates how people focus, manage distractions and adapt to changing demands. Because attention underlies so many cognitive processes, the research cuts across topics like creative problem solving, mind wandering and mental well-being.
To study these questions, the lab is increasingly “using immersive technology, like virtual reality, to recreate complex everyday situations right in the lab. This allows us to study attention exactly as it happens in the real world,” he explained.
Brosowsky’s own path into attention research began unexpectedly. As an undergraduate, he was primarily interested in music perception before working with Dr. Todd Mondor at the U of M on a project examining auditory attention and ambiguous melodies. That experience led him toward graduate research on selective attention and later postdoctoral work on mind wandering.
More recently, his lab has focused on the relationship between attention and mental imagery.
The project addressed what Brosowsky described as a paradox in previous research. While vivid mental imagery has been linked to both positive and negative mental health outcomes, it remained unclear why the same cognitive experience appeared to produce such different results.
His team found that it “actually comes down to attentional control”, he noted. Mental imagery was associated with positive outcomes when accompanied by good attentional control but was linked to negative outcomes through spontaneous mind wandering.
Brosowsky shared that the findings also highlighted a gap in existing research tools. Because no existing measure distinguished between spontaneous mental imagery and imagery that is deliberately generated, the lab developed and validated a new scale to measure those different experiences.
Using this new tool, the researchers found that frequent spontaneous imagery strongly predicted negative mental health outcomes, while deliberate imagery predicted positive outcomes. According to Brosowsky, these findings help resolve the paradox identified in earlier research.
Beyond individual studies, Brosowsky hopes his research encourages people to think differently about attention.
“It’s really easy to fall into the trap of thinking that focus is always good and distraction is always bad,” he said. “But our work emphasizes the adaptive regulation of attention.”
Sometimes sustained focus is beneficial, while in other situations allowing attention to shift more broadly may be the most effective response, he explained. A growing area of interest for the lab is understanding how people monitor and think about their own attention in real time.
The lab is also expanding its use of immersive technologies to investigate cognition outside traditional computer-based experiments.
One upcoming project, led by one of his graduate students will examine how long-term cannabis use influences attention while driving. Participants will complete driving simulator tasks before and after a three-day period of abstinence, while researchers use eye tracking and thought probes to examine mind wandering during driving.
Rather than measuring only driving performance, the project aims to determine whether attentional lapses caused by mind wandering contribute to the effects observed among long-term cannabis users.
Looking further ahead, Brosowsky hoped that immersive technologies such as virtual reality will make it possible to measure cognition in ways that better reflect everyday functioning. He envisioned developing realistic virtual tasks, such as cooking in a kitchen, to study multitasking and cognitive performance while maintaining the control of laboratory research.
For Brosowsky, contributing reliable research remains the primary goal.
“My ultimate goal is simply to ask interesting questions and conduct rigorous, replicable research so the piece [of puzzle] I contribute stands the test of time,” he said.
He also credited the collaborative nature of the Immersive Cognition Lab for many of its current directions. Graduate and undergraduate researchers are leading projects on topics including portable electroencephalogram (EEG), spatial attention in virtual reality, sleep and mind wandering, creative thinking and journaling, reflecting the lab’s broad interest in understanding how attention shapes cognition across a variety of contexts.
The Immersive Cognition Lab accepts undergraduate, Honours and graduate students and offers opportunities through the PURE program and Undergraduate Research Awards. Interested students can check out current opportunities through the lab’s website at icoglab.ca/opportunities.html.
