Grant+ideas+2

From Rene: This is really interesting: (1) Controlled stimuli that vary in levels of interactivity (we need to think about an approriate stimulus that allows rather short exposure and response times as well as many repetitions and reliably manipulates interactivity levels) (2) Participants that differ in developmental stage/spatial ability (should not be too difficult to recruit those participants) (3) A focus on attentional networks (be it alerting, orienting/selection, executive). Attention as a cognitive function is among the best (not saying fully) understood function with lots of available and valid tasks (some used in brain imaging environments) and more or less clearly defined ROIs (regions of interest) which will save us a so-called localizer task. This is GOOD! We probably would focus on the posner networks first and use a selective attention task. One difficulty of Fran's idea might be that it would require to conduct eye-tracking *during* fMRI, which is challenging/expensive, but not impossible. Some brain imaging experiments have used mouse/joystick pointers for selection tasks which correlate with eye-tracking to more than 0.9 and are cheap and more reliable in brain imaging environments. (4) The relationship between attention, levels of interactivity (cognitive challenges that meet or do not meet cognitive abilities), reward, and recall clearly relate to the experience of flow which could be understood as one relevant factor (motivation!) of learning experiences and learning outcomes. I have to think about all this in more detail after my workshop nightmare is over and I am able to look into the literature and into the papers you sent around - but I already like it. This looks like a really interesting, important, and doable (with brain imaging and eye- tracking) research.