Explore projects in Attention!
These projects investigate how individuals focus, shift, and sustain mental resources in response to their environment. These studies explore different types of attention—such as selective, sustained, and divided attention—and how they develop across the lifespan. Researchers examine the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie attention, using tools like behavioral tasks, eye-tracking, and neuroimaging. Projects may also explore how attention is influenced by factors like emotion, motivation, learning environments, or distraction, and how attention deficits (e.g., ADHD) impact functioning. This research informs educational strategies, clinical interventions, and technologies designed to support focus, learning, and cognitive performance.
“Illustration of caregiver and child engaging in joint attention” by Rita.Obeid6 is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported via Wikimedia Commons
- Development of Attention in Preschool ChildrenProject Abstract/Summary Children develop in a world cluttered with people’s talking faces and accompanying voices. To avoid confusion, and to communicate properly with any particular person, children must be able to perceptually segregate multiple talking faces and voices. To do so, they must identify and select corresponding face-voice pairs and then bind them into unitary and integrated audiovisual entities. Selective/sustained attention plays a critical role in the perceptual segregation process because it helps us identify and select corresponding faces and… Read more: Development of Attention in Preschool Children
- Mechanisms of Willed AttentionProject Abstract/Summary In our daily lives, it is vitally important to be aware and alert to the challenges of our surroundings, in order take appropriate actions to survive and thrive. Central to our success in doing so is the ability to attend to the most salient and important events and objects, while also ignoring distracting information that may divert us from our goals. Several factors contribute to determining the relevance of events and objects, including our momentary goals (e.g., navigating… Read more: Mechanisms of Willed Attention