Welcome to the Human Attention Lab
How many times has a parent, a teacher, or a friend told you "pay attention!" How many times have you paid attention to someone, only to ignore someone or something else, or failed to pay attention to something altogether? Actually, if you are reading and comprehending these questions, than you are doing a good job of attending right now!
What is attention? William James stated that "we all know what attention is," and maybe he was correct. We all know that attention is focusing on something, but how do we do that? How do we know what to pay attention to? How do we know what to ignore? Are we in complete control of our attention, or can stimuli in the environment dictate what we pay attention to? Is some information processed in a "reflex-like" manner, without attention? And just what does attention do!?
Members of the Human Attention Lab at The University of Scranton conduct research into the psychology and the mechanisms involved with human attention from a cognitive, information-processing perspective. We are especially interested in how previous experience, expectations, and goals influence the control of selective attention, which leads to efficent task performance and enhances perceptual experiencess via sensory input. Members of the lab conduct behavioral research on a variety of projects into visual and auditory attention, working memory, perception, and object-based selection.
For more information on our current projects, please see our Current Projects page.
Members of my lab will be trained in various behavioral research methodologies used to study human attention, human subject testing, and advanced data analysis using SPSS. For interested individuals, I am happy to teach the basic to programming computer-based studies that can be used in the lab. In our weekly lab meetings, we discuss current and future projects, recently collected data in our lab, recent findings from other labs, and how to analyze data.
For information on joining the lab, please contact Dr. Bryan R. Burnham at attention.perform@gmail.com In the email, please tell a little bit about yourself, why you are interested in working in the lab and any projects that you may be interested in working on.