Current Research and Interests

PhD Student. The fast pace of today’s hectic world means that we are surrounded more and more by an overwhelming overload of sensory information. So how do our brains cope? I am deeply fascinated by this subject: note how we can be distracted by our name in a distant conversation at a party; an attractive individual in the street; or a spider on a dashboard. And yet, at the same time, we fail to notice a magician’s sleight of hand, the touch of a pickpocket, or even (as in one experiment) a moonwalking ‘gorilla’ set up to infiltrate a basketball game. My work with the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL adopts visual emotional stimuli to study these matters of attention, conscious awareness and unconscious processing over a typical life-span. My other interests in the field stretch from inattentional, change and choice blindness, to human perception of time; and from individual differences to demonstrations of established visual phenomenon in other sensory modalities.