L. Folk, Ph.D., Lab Director
Department of Psychology
office: 252 Tolentine Hall
lab: M52 Tolentine Hall
The Adult Visual Cognition Lab is primarily interested in
understanding modeling visual selective
attention in humans. We conduct behavioral studies in which
patterns of response times and error rates are used to infer the
mechanisms responsible for determining how attention gets
allocated to stimuli in the environment. Of particular interest
is in the nature of “distractibility,” or the ability of certain
kinds of stimuli to involuntarily “capture” attention, and
the degree to which such capture is dependent on task set.
We typically use variants of visual search and spatial cuing tasks to
explore these issues. The lab has been funded by grants from
the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science
Foundation, and NASA.
the context of understanding selective attention, the lab is also interested in how
selective attentional processes vary with age. We run studies in which both young adults (college age) and
older adults (60 – 80 yrs old) perform various types of attentional tasks. Variations in performance as a function of
age allow us to draw inferences about how age affects specific
cognitive processes. For example, we have shown that the ability to use top-down information to guide
visual search is compromised with age. In addition,
we have demonstated that attentional capture in older adults
follows similar patterns as that display by young adults.
Finally, the lab in also interested in research that applies theoretical
models of selective attention to applied issues. For
example, we have published several papers on
the allocation of attention in three-dimensional visual
displays. More recently, we have looked at the
influence of irrelevant acoustic noise (such as that found in
typical factory settings or airports) on the processing of
information from visual displays.