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Welcome

Greetings, visitor! Please note that this site is a work in progress and we are scientists, not web designers; we remain ever-hopeful that someday we will get around to making it prettier. [TO DO: Insert ironic 1990s-style "under construction" animated GIF.]

 

News/Updates/Positions

Spring 2021: Hey, guess who has about 12 thumbs and didn't update the news part of this website for several years? That would be us. Wow, so much has happened in that time... I think there was a pandemic at some point? Hey, remember early on in that, when we were all watching Tiger King? Weird times. Anyway, sorry about the lack of updates... maybe we'll be better about that in the future. (Arrested Development narrator: "They won't.")

Sept 2016: Good news, everyone! In collaboration with the lab of Mike Dodd at UNL and some fantastic colleagues at the University of Delaware and the University of Nevada, Reno, the lab will be sharing in a new $6 million grant to do some cool research projects and help build up the infrastructure of cognitive neuroscience research at UNL. In related news, effective immediately, lab meeting refreshments will consist of champagne and caviar. Monocles will be provided.

Positions: The lab is not currently recruiting any postdocs, graduate students, or other full-time personnel. However, as Yoda said -- always in motion is the future, so things could change anytime. It is also possible that we forgot to update the website again, so if you are particularly interested in joining us, you can always email Matt for the latest news.

We are also kind of full up on undergraduate helpers at the moment but again, if you feel that information is out of date or are especially interested in joining us, just email Matt to discuss opportunities to get involved.

(If you are here because you are interested in volunteering as a research participant, please see the Contact page for details on that.)

 

Research themes

xkcd_tryscience xkcd.com

Our group has many interests, but most of our research is broadly organized around the theme of studying the interplay between two aspects of cognition: The internal world of thoughts and memories that come from inside our heads (encompassed by the umbrella term of "reflection") and the way that we process sensory (mostly visual) information from the external environment ("perception").

After reading the previous paragraph, you may find yourself saying, "Wait a second -- so your research focuses on 'seeing stuff' and 'thinking about stuff'? Doesn't that cover just about EVERYTHING in psychology?" Well, not everything -- but you'd be correct in noting that these research themes have deep and wide-ranging connections to many different topics in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience (notably working memory, executive function, long-term memory, visual processing, and mental imagery), and have potential applications in the study of aging, mental illness, childhood development, and so on.

So within these broad themes, there are numerous interesting questions we can ask, but one of the specific areas we focus on is attention. You're probably aware that perceptual (e.g. visual) attention is used to select a subset of incoming sensory information for deeper processing, while the rest of the information flooding our senses at any given moment is mostly ignored. The same is true in the reflective domain -- when focused internally, attention is a mechanism for focusing on and shifting between thoughts and memory items, and as such attention plays an important role in guiding and shaping the so-called "stream of consciousness." One of the main interests in our lab is how attention operates similarly or differently in perception versus reflection. Are perceptual attention and reflective attention basically the same thing, just focused in different directions (outward versus inward)? To what extent do their neural mechanisms overlap? Do they have similar consequences for behavior?

To address these questions, we use a number of different techniques. Sometimes we use functional MRI (fMRI), sometimes we use electroencephalography (EEG), sometimes we use good old-fashioned behavior (i.e., pressing buttons on a keyboard in response to a computer-based task). Occasionally, we incorporate measures such as eyetracking as well. Sometimes, we employ fancy statistical techniques and heroic feats of computer programming -- specifically deep learning, which we've been focusing a lot of our efforts on recently -- but other questions can be answered with more straightforward designs and relatively basic statistics. There's something for everyone!

 

Previous findings

att_ref_blobs

To make things a bit more concrete, here are some of our published findings so far (see Publications page for references and PDFs of papers):

 

Ongoing projects

The above are just a few examples of projects for which we are currently collecting or analyzing data, but we have many more projects in various stages of development or planned for the future. Once more, if you'd like to play a role in making these projects successful, please get in touch to discuss opportunities for working in the lab!

 

EEG fun
We have fun.

 

At the Frog Pond at VSS
Food! It's what we eat!

 

Outside The Sultan's Kite in Lincoln
We do also do work! But mostly, it seems, we eat food!