— Motivated Cognition Lab

Archive
February, 2018 Monthly archive

On September 1st, 2018, I will leave my post at the University of Trento to take up a position as Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham, UK.

As always, I am very interested in hearing from potential PhD students and postdoctoral scholars and in supporting applications for funding.

In particular, applications for the Marie Cure Individual Fellowship are accepted from April 12th, 2018 (with a September 12 deadline). I would be very happy to talk with applicants about potential projects and the possibility of carrying this grant at Birmingham.

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Poppy’s first first-authored paper! Congratulations Poppy!

Sharp, Melcher, & Hickey (2018). Endogenous attention modulates the temporal window of integration. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics.

Constructing useful representations of our visual environment requires the ability to selectively pay attention to particular locations at specific moments. Whilst there has been much investigation on the influence of selective attention on spatial discrimination, less is known about its influence on temporal discrimination. In particular, little is known about how endogenous attention influences two fundamental and opposing temporal processes: segregation – the parsing of the visual scene over time into separate features, and integration – the binding together of related elements. In four experiments, we tested how endogenous cueing to a location influences each of these opposing processes. Results demonstrate a strong cueing effect on both segregation and integration. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that endogenous attention can influence both of these opposing processes in a flexible manner. The finding has implications for arbitrating between accounts of the multiple modulatory mechanisms comprising selective attention.

 

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