Welcome to the Attention and Cognition Lab at GWU.

One of the fundamental properties of our environment is that it is comprised of a multitude of sensory information. Given such richness of input, humans are faced with the problem of having limited capacity for processing information, on the one hand, and the need to analyze as much of the sensory input as possible, on the other.

Here at the Attention and Cognition Laboratory our research is concerned with understanding the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying attentional selection,   and focuses on two general questions.  The first question concerns the representations, or units, from which selection occurs and this line of research focuses primarily on the behavioral and neural correlates of spatial and object-based selection as human observers analyze incoming information.  The second question concerns the computations involved in the selection per se and this research investigates the neural source of the attentional signal and the impact this signal exerts on the neural trace of the sensory stimulus before and after it has been attentionally selected.



Lab News:
  • Congratulations to Ian Donovan on receiving the 2011 George Gamow Undergraduate Research Fellowship Award.
  • Congratulations to Ian Donovan for having been accepted into the 13th Annual Undergraduate Summer Workshop in Cognitive Science and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania.
  • Congratulations to Emily Bilger on being accepted into the Postbaccalaureate Intramural Research Training Award Program at the National Institutes of Health! Emily will begin her position in the Baker Lab upon graduation this spring.
  • NEW GRANT: “ Uncertainty Reduction: The Guiding Principle of Attentional Allocation” research program is now funded for three years by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
  • NEW PAPERTop-down and bottom-up attentional guidance: Investigating the role of the dorsal and ventral parietal cortecies. Special issue "Space and Attention: Neuropsychological Studies" in the Journal of Experimental Brain Research.
  • NEW PAPERObject-based attention: Shifting or uncertainty? Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics