Here are some research projects I have been working on:
Distraction Mitigation during Visual Search
Cognitive life depends on performing goal-directed activities in the face of distraction. One frequent source of distraction is stimulation from external sources, stimulation that is irrelevant to the task at hand. Pop-ups on a computer screen while one is working on a manuscript are one salient example. Such distractions have to be filtered out to keep one on task. The problem, then, is to keep one from having attention captured by external distraction. A task has been developed and studied extensively that provides an important model of attention capture by irrelevant external stimulation, the color-singleton task. This task has been studied using standard response time, accuracy, eye position, and ERP measures, and a fount of information has been gathered about the conditions under which one is distracted by external sources. However, substantial issues remain about such distraction, and the present research is about applying a novel method, the forced-response technique, to allow us to model underlying processes that are engaged by this task and to address a number of important issues concerned with distraction, suppression of distracting stimulation, and modulation of distractibility.
Mind-wandering and Eye Movements
We rely on our eyes to extract visual information from the outside world. The way we move our eyes to some extent reflects our current cognitive state. For example, we can learn much about how people comprehend a scene by looking at which parts of the scene are examined, for how long, and in what order. But people’s attention is not always on the current task at hand – they think about things unrelated to the task from time to time (i.e., mind-wandering). So, how do people move their eyes when they are mind-wandering? How do those eye movement patterns tell us about what goes wrong during mind-wandering? Can we use eye movements to objectively detect a mind-wandering episode？
Individual Differences in Distractibility
Cognitive life depends on performing goal-directed activities in the face of distraction. Yet, there are many types of distraction, from irrelevant background music to thoughts that are not related to here and now. Do these distractions share certain similarities? How can we best characterize a person’s distractibility?
Understanding Interference Control
Interference control is the ability to prevent interference due to resource or stimulus competition. For example, if I ask you to report the color of the word “red“, you must control your urge to say “red” because the correct answer is “green”. It has been proposed that interference control is impaired among people of certain groups, such as people with ADHD and people with old age. But in fact, the empirical evidence is far from clear, partly due to several common methodological issues present in the literature. We are currently investigating this question with a new method. We have also been using a novel computational model to understand how (if any) interference control is impaired under some conditions or for some individuals.
