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Current Research
Overview
Our laboratory's research focuses on attention and working memory. Most of our experiments use traditional behavioral methods or event-related potential (ERP) recordings, but we also do work with other techniques.
- Click here for a detailed description of our ongoing research
- Click here for more information about the techniques we use
Attention
The concept of attention has generally been used to describe many different cognitive processes and functions. In general, it describes our ability to selectively process certain aspects of our perceptual experience. Current evidence suggests that we do not have one attentional mechanism, but rather several acting at different stages of processing. Each of these mechanisms may have different roles, and therefore operate differently in each subsystem. One of the current goals of our research is to delineate the different visual attentional mechanisms, their attributes, and roles.
We are currently studing several aspects of visual attention, including:
- How attention affects our perceptual processing.
- How attention affects visual working memory encoding.
- How perceptual-level attention and working memory-level attention can interact.
- The spatial properties of attention.
- How we can focus our attention onto objects rather than locations.
- Neural substrates of attention.
Visual Working Memory
Attention plays a very important role in determining which perceptual representations are stored in visual working memory. To understand this role of attention, we have begun investigating the nature of visual working memory. Our research focuses on the capacity limits and representational formats of visual working memory.
We currently have projects investigating visual working memory, including:
- How working memory interacts with attention.
- What are the units of storage in working memory?
- How working memory can "chunk" certain types of information.
- Neural substrates of visual working memory.