Selective Attention

Watch the Road! Are failures of distracted driving due to using peripheral vision or the difficulty of the distracting task?

Although the human experience is truly a unique one, it’s comforting to know that we all share some experiences and emotions. For example, we were all excited the day we were handed our very first motor vehicle driver’s license. You know, the one with the awkward smile and terrible lighting. When we first received our […]

Continue Reading

Transferring Lemons to Lemonade: Using the Stroop Effect to Transfer Attentional States

There are some tasks that require cognitive processes that are habitual, automatic, and to some degree effortless, such as seeing a word and automatically reading it or seeing two numbers and automatically processing their magnitudes (e.g., seeing 5 and 3 and perceiving 5 to be greater). There are other tasks that require cognitive processes that […]

Continue Reading

When attention jumps the shark: The asymmetric role of the frontal hemispheres

Imagine settling into the well-deserved holiday on the Ningaloo Reef. The Indian Ocean is warm and gentle and you go for your first exploratory snorkel. The corals are beginning to recover from their latest bleach and the number and coloring of the tropical fish is as enchanting as it is astounding. And then you take […]

Continue Reading

When THREE or 3 makes 3 harder to RSVP: Negative priming in rapid serial visual presentation

William James famously said that the world is “one great blooming, buzzing confusion” to an infant whose sensory apparatus is “assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once.” As adults, we continue to be assailed by stimuli, but out attentional apparatus permits us to deal with the blooming and buzzing confusion quite well. […]

Continue Reading