Welcome to the Human Attention Lab
 How many times has a parent, teacher, or 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 altogether? Actually, if you are reading and comprehending these questions, then 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 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 on the mechanisms involved with attention from a cognitive, information-processing perspective. We are interested in how experience, expectation, and goals influence the control of attention, which leads to efficient task performance and enhances perceptual experience. Members of the lab conduct behavioral research on a variety of projects into attention, working memory, perception, and object-based selection.
For more information on our current projects, please see our Current Projects page. Undergraduate members of the lab are trained to use various behavioral research methods for human subject testing and advanced data analysis. For interested individuals, I am happy to teach the basic computer programming. 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, contact Dr. Bryan 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.
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