Selective Visual Perception

Our research suggests that vision uses a pre-attentive (i.e. consciously inaccessible) mechanism that can detect an important visual pattern, as defined by a broad range of criteria, from low level features up to semantic meaning.  Detection triggers the deployment of a transient attentional burst rapidly enough to occur within the same visual fixation (i.e. about 200 milliseconds).   This attentional burst is intended to snatch the target item from the visual stream and encode it into memory before the eye moves away.   Most recently, this research has studied the ability of a target item to capture attention (Wyble, Potter & Bowman under review).

My research involves a combination of methods:  Behavioral data from paradigms such as rapid serial visual presentation (in which we observe the Attentional Blink and Repetition Blindness) find the limits of the visual system's functional capabilities. From these data, neurally inspired computational models provide insight into the sequence of the cognitive operations involved in perception.  

As an additional source of convergent evidence, electrophysiological data can be compared to the time course of activity within the model.  Human EEG is particularly well suited to identifying the temporal correlates of selection and encoding, thought to be indexed by the N2pc and P3 components, respectively.  In this vein, Patrick Craston and Srivas Chennu, both grad students at the University of Kent, have provided important theoretical work and EEG data in relation to the aforementioned modelling efforts.