Author: Polly Dalton

Term has now ended and our final year project students have left the lab. Both projects provided nice demonstrations of ‘inattentional numbness’, although the effects of perceptual load were less clear. Many thanks to Beth, Clarissa, David, George, Holly, June, Katherine and Luke, and good luck in your exams!

We are delighted to welcome Sandra Murphy back to the Attention Lab. She completed her PhD here in 2013 and returns to us this week following a year in Birmingham as a postdoc with Professor Jane Raymond at the Visual Experience Lab. Sandra will be working on our new ESRC project on tactile attention.

Two final year groups have recently started data collection for their projects investigating the consequences of tactile selective attention. Can focusing attention on one hand leave us ‘numb’ to stimuli presented without warning on the other hand? Watch this space! Good luck to Beth, Clarissa, David, George, Holly, June, Katherine and Luke for the rest of the process.

Image: stockimages / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

A belated welcome to Stuart Hyde who joined the Attention Lab from Southampton in September. Stuart’s PhD project is entitled ‘The effects of vehicle automation on situation awareness in drivers of different ages’.

We have a new project starting in the lab this month, funded through a Royal Holloway Research Strategy Fund award. The project will be looking at cognition following bereavement and marks the start of an exciting new collaboration with the Memory Lab run by Laura Mickes.

Image: Renjith Krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Jinglin Zheng has recently started her data collection, looking at the link between people’s values and their attentional allocation. Welcome to the lab Jinglin!

Applications are now open for an exciting new PhD project starting in September 2014 and investigating the impacts of increased vehicle automation on drivers’ situational awareness. The project is a collaboration between the Attention Lab and Transport Research Laboratory and is funded by the ESRC (through the South East Doctoral Training Centre) and Transport Research Laboratory. More details are available here.

We have recently welcomed eight new final year students to our lab. Arnaud, Harriet, Ollie and Sangi are looking at real-world distractability and Akzhan, Becky, Rosie and Yamako are looking at implicit processing of unattended information. Both projects are up and running, so let us know if you’d like to participate!

Our latest article – ‘Perceptual load does not modulate auditory distractor processing‘ – has recently been published in Cognition. It includes some experiments from Sandra’s PhD as well as some that Nick ran during his time with us. As the title suggests, the paper argues that perceptual load theory (see Lavie, 2005, for review) might not apply directly to the auditory modality.

 

We have just got back from the European Society for Cognitive Psychology conference in beautiful Budapest.

Sandra presented some of our work on auditory perceptual load in a talk entitled “The role of perceptual load in auditory selective attention”.