Research

Experience-Driven Attention

Attention is often studied as either an involuntary response to salient stimuli like flashing lights or a voluntary process to help us achieve goals like finding a set of lost keys. In addition to serving these functions, attention is implicitly shaped by our experiences to help us adapt to changing environments. We learn to attend to aversively conditioned stimuli, rewarded stimuli, and stimulus features and locations often associated with our search targets. I study the limits of how experience shapes our allocation of attention. Most of my work on this topic investigates how experience-driven attention differs from other better-understood types of attention in an effort to build better models of the cognitive mechanisms supporting attentional selection.

Attention in Vision and Audition

Understanding attention across modalities is not as simple as pooling our knowledge of attention in each modality to understand a single attention system, both because attentional mechanisms are not wholly shared across modalities and because the neural coding of stimulus features (especially spatial and temporal features) shapes the effects of attention in modality-specific ways. I have ongoing research regarding how attention operates within and across modalities and the extent to which this is a function of the features being attended.

Attention and Vision Loss

I'm interested in the interactions between attention and vision loss, particularly in central visual field loss. These interactions are bidirectional, in that improving attentional function (e.g., through behavioral training) can reduce everyday disabilities associated with vision loss while at the same time visual field loss can impair the ability to effectively deploy visuospatial attention. I have used clinical studies of people with central vision loss as well as gaze-contingent viewing in normally sighted individuals to understand how attention affects and is affected by vision loss.