Whose memory is it anyway? Joint action effects on working memory and attention

The project examines how attention and working memory interact when two people are jointly performing tasks. Previous work has shown that information held in working memory can influence attention; for example it is difficult not to attend to an irrelevant item in a display if we happen also to be holding that item in memory.
The planned studies will assess whether this link between working memory and attention holds not only for the information that one person should use to perform a task, but also to the information that a partner might use, if two individuals perform a task together. This will be tested by having two people perform tasks where they must hold items in memory and then search for another target.
The experiments will test whether the information held by person A also influences attention in person B, and whether this depends on the degree of competition or co-operation in the task. The experiments will track eye movements to measure overt attention and the neural bases of these effects will be examined using functional brain imaging.