About Us

Our Research

In daily life, we are often overloaded by multiple competing stimuli and tasks. To function efficiently, we use mechanisms of attention to selectively process the most relevant sensory information and juggle our cognitive processing resources amongst the most important tasks. Our research focuses on understanding these attentional mechanisms using experiments that measure behavior, eye movements, and event-related potentials (ERPs). We are part of the Cognition and Neuroscience program in the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri.

Specific Interests

We are interested in a variety of topics related to attention. Specific interests include:

• Attention

• Cognitive Control

• Visual Search

• Eye Movements

• Event-Related Potentials (ERPs)

A Little History

Dr. Nicholas Gaspelin is the principal investigator.  As a graduate student, he studied in the cognitive neuroscience program at the University of New Mexico with Dr. Eric Ruthruff where his research focused on the control of visual attention. As a postdoctoral fellow, he studied at the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis with Dr. Steven Luck. There, his research explored a specific model of attention which posits that people can learn to ignore salient distractions via a newly discovered inhibitory process. His postdoctoral research was funded by an individual NRSA from the National Eye Institute and the UC Davis Center for Vision Science. Recently, he won an NSF CAREER Award for his research on attention. He was recently hired via the prestigious MizzouForward initiative.