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Research
Distracted and confused?
One focus of our work on attention concerns what determines whether people are able to focus attention on what they deem relevant, while preventing being distracted by irrelevant information. You can read about this in a review article in Trends in Cognitive Science
Our research indicates some critical factors:
Load on frontal executive control functions (read a Nature Reviews Neuroscience "highlight" about this work)
The
type of distracting stimulus matters too.
Our work indicates that some stimuli are particularly distracting! for example distractor faces tend to interfere regardless of how much the current task engages attention. Also whenever an odd visual or auditory stimulus is present it tends to "capture attention".
Another focus of our work is on
We investigate the neural mechanisms of awareness using functional imaging and magnetic stimulation, our research on awareness also address the relationship of attention and awareness. This relationship is studied in our lab in experiments showing how inattention can cause "Inattentional Blindness" and "Change Blindness". A new line of our research reveals that attention can also affect the processing of invisible stimuli. See our recent Current Biology paper about this.
Our research on attention, executive control and awareness has a wide range of implications to daily life situations ranging from magic to driving, advertising and education.
To view a short clip (aired on ABC news in December, 2006) on the implications of our work to magic click here
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Other areas of research:
Spatial attention and feature integration
Effects of attention on body orientation and balance