Research

Mechanisms of Attention

What are the mechanisms by which attention influences perception of simple and complex stimuli?

We are interested in determining the behavioural and neural activity associated with pure measures of attentional selection and orienting. By using simple response-based tasks and EEG, we can examine the relative differences when attending to sensor events in order to better understand the basic mechanisms of human attention and their behavioural and neural correlates.

Dr. Chris Blair wearing an EEG recording device and sitting in a chair. — Dr. Chris Blair wearing an EEG recording device and participating in an EEG study.

Jessica sitting in a chair wearing eye tracking glasses. There is a red dot near her chin that represents the pupil fixation of her interaction partner. — Jessica Haight engaging in a dyadic interaction while wearing Tobii Pro mobile eye tracking glasses. The red circle is her partner's pupil fixation.

A heat map of eye movement and proportions data. Shows that looking time is primarily directed towards eyes and mouth. — A heat map of eye movement and proportions data collected in Dr. Francesca Capozzi, Dr. Lauren Human, and Dr. Jelena Ristic's paper "Attention promotes accurate impression formation."

Social Attention

Research suggests that attention to social information is unique and distinct as compared to attention to other objects.

In this manner, social attention can help us interpret social information by enabling the comprehension of subtle visual signals, e.g., eye gaze direction. We are investigating whether social attention is a unique process by examining its basic properties as well as its relationship with other social cognitive processes like group membership and identity.

Studying social attention also allows us to examine how we attend to social information in a real-world environment, rather than in a lab setting. We are using eye tracking to examine how we attend and respond to simple low-level stimuli or more complex everyday natural scenes and movie clips. By using this approach, we can estimate the units of social attention to understand the effects that environmental complexity has on social orienting.