Christopher L. Asplund

I am a cognitive (neuro)scientist, meaning that I explore our amazing cognitive abilities and how they are realized in the brain.

My lab seeks to understand attentional control and consciousness. We are interested in "normal" human function and experience as well as their variety and potential. We consider questions about differences across:

Conditions. How does expectation affect consciousness, including the experience of pain? How do attentional states affect performance?
Individuals. Why do people differ in their ability to flexibly deploy attention? Why does attentional function differ in those with clinical conditions (especially ADHD or ASD)? What are the consequences for how such individuals experience the world?
Time. To what degree can learning or training change attention?

Our primary investigative tool is behavioral experimentation. It is often complemented by functional neuroimaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), eye-tracking, and other physiological measures.

Responses to visual surprise stimuli (surprise trials - standard trials) in a surprise-induced blindness paradigm.
Image credit: Gwenisha Liaw

You can learn more about our work from my CV, list of publications, ORCiD profie, or page on Google Scholar.

I am a faculty member at Yale-NUS College in the Division of Social Sciences. As a liberal arts college, Yale-NUS focuses on excellent undergraduate education from the humanities to the sciences, active learning in small seminar-style classes, participation in community initiatives, and deep investigation through research.

In addition to my position as an Associate Professor at Yale-NUS, I am a Primary Investigator at the N.1 Institute for Health at the National University of Singapore (NUS), and I hold courtesy joint appointments with the Department of Biomedical Engineering (NUS), the Department of Psychology (NUS), the Institute for Digital Medicine (WiSDM; Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine), the Centre for Sleep and Cognition (Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine), and the program in Neuroscience and Behavioural Disorders (Duke-NUS Medical School).

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