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 process 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, object-based and 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.