About
37
Publications
13,218
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Introduction
I am a postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. John Jonides in the Department of Psychology of the University of Michigan. I am interested in how our cognitive system deals with distractions and interferences when they come up. I like to use eye-tracking to examine these questions because it tells us a lot about how we deploy our visual attention in real-time. But I also regularly use other methods such as computational modeling and structural equation modeling in my work.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
January 2018 - April 2018
Position
- Instructor
Description
- Taught three weekly review sections; Graded essays and exams; Held office hours
September 2017 - December 2017
Position
- Instructor
Description
- Primary instructor as a three-hour long lecture every week; Designed course syllabus; Graded essays and exams; Held office hours
January 2017 - April 2017
Position
- Instructor
Description
- Supervised student research projects; Provided writing feedback to students' essays; Held office hours
Education
September 2014 - May 2019
September 2010 - May 2014
Publications
Publications (37)
Prior research suggests that people often misunderstand visualizations of inflow (e.g., deposits in a banking context) and accumulation (e.g., cumulative savings) in dynamic systems. The present study aimed to examine participants’ understanding of accumulation functions and to develop and test the effectiveness of video-based interventions for imp...
Abrupt onsets are commonly assumed to be a class of stimuli with high physical salience. Presumably because of this, abrupt onsets tend to capture attention even when other types of distractors, such as color singletons, do not. However, there has been a lack of consensus on the definition and measurement of physical salience. As a result, it is un...
The study of attentional allocation due to external stimulation has a long history in psychology. Early research by Yantis and Jonides suggested that abrupt onsets constitute a unique class of stimuli that captures attention in a stimulus-driven fashion unless attention is proactively directed elsewhere. Since then, the study of visual attention ha...
Despite long-standing concerns about the use of free reaction times (RTs) in cognitive psychology, they remain a prevalent measure of conflict resolution. This report presents the forced-response method as a fresh approach to examine speed–accuracy trade-off functions (SATs) in conflict tasks. The method involves fixing the overall response time, v...
Researchers have long debated how humans select relevant objects amid physically salient distractions. An increasingly popular view holds that the key to avoiding distractions lies in suppressing the attentional priority of a salient distractor. However, the precise mechanisms of distractor suppression remain elusive. Because the computation of att...
Humans tend to slow down after making an error. A longstanding account of this post-error slowing is that people are simply more cautious. However, accuracy typically does not improve following an error, leading some researchers to suggest that an initial ‘orienting’ response may initially impair performance immediately following error. Unfortunate...
Abrupt onsets are commonly assumed to be a class of stimuli with high physical salience. Presumably because of this, abrupt onsets tend to capture attention even when other types of distractors, such as color singletons, do not. However, there has been a lack of consensus on the definition and measurement of physical salience. As a result, it is un...
Abrupt onsets are commonly assumed to be a class of stimuli with high physical salience. This high salience has been used to explain past findings showing abrupt onsets captured attention more strongly compared to other types of distractors, such as color singletons. However, there has been a lack of consensus about the definition and measurement o...
The study of attentional allocation due to external stimulation has a long history in psychology. Early research by Yantis and Jonides suggested that abrupt onsets constitute a unique class of stimuli that captures attention in a stimulus-driven fashion unless attention is proactively directed elsewhere. Since then, the study of visual attention ha...
Researchers have long debated how humans select relevant objects amid physically salient distractions. An increasingly popular view holds that the key to avoiding distractions lies in suppressing the attentional priority of a salient distractor. However, the precise mechanisms of distractor suppression remain elusive. Because the computation of att...
People differ substantially in their vulnerability to distraction. Yet, many types of distractions exist, from external stimulation to internal thoughts. How should we characterize individual differences in their distractibility? Two samples of adult participants (total N = 1220) completed a large battery of questionnaires assessing different facet...
Introduction
Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are generally distractible. Yet, the precise relationship between ADHD and distractibility remains under-specified in two respects. First, different sources of distraction, such as background noise or mind wandering, may not be equally associated with ADHD. Second, ADHD itself...
Effective visual search relies on reactively disengaging from distractors when the features of the distractors are unpredictable. Does this ability differ between adults with and without Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)? Participants (36 with ADHD, 46 non-ADHD) completed the additional-singleton task, in which they searched for a uni...
Despite long-standing concerns about the use of free reaction times (RTs) in cognitive psychology, they remain a prevalent measure of conflict resolution. This report presents the forced-response method as a fresh approach to examine speed-accuracy tradeoff functions (SATs) in conflict tasks. The method involves fixing the overall response time, va...
The current study examined whether the suppression of overt attention to a salient distractor requires attentional resources. In a feature-search task, participants searched for a constant shape among different shapes while ignoring a uniquely colored distractor. Trial-by-trial fluctuations in attentional resources were assessed via thought probes...
On April 13, 2021, the CDC announced that the administration of Johnson and Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine would be paused due to a rare blood clotting side effect in ~ 0.0001% of people given the vaccine. Most people who are hesitant to get a COVID-19 vaccine list potential side effects as their main concern (PEW, 2021); thus, it is likely that this a...
People differ substantially in their vulnerability to distraction. Yet, distraction can occur for various reasons, such as external interference, thought intrusions, repetitive negative thoughts, and mind-wandering. How are these different forms of distraction related to each other? Is there a group of people who are successful at resisting all for...
Humans tend to slow down after making an error. A longstanding account of this post-error slowing is that people are simply more cautious. However, accuracy typically does not improve following an error leading some researchers to suggest that an initial "orienting" response may initially impair performance immediately following error. Unfortunatel...
On April 13, 2021, the CDC announced that the administration of Johnson and Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine would be paused due to a rare blood clotting side effect in ~0.0001% of people given the vaccine. Most people who are hesitant to get a COVID-19 vaccine list potential side effects as their main concern (PEW, 2021); thus, it is likely that this an...
We suggest that consideration of trial-by-trial variations, individual differences, and training data will enrich the current framework in Luck, S. J., Gaspelin, N., Folk, C. L., Remington, R. W., & Theeuwes, J. (2020. Progress toward resolving the attentional capture debate. Visual Cognition, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/13506285.2020.1848949). W...
During scene viewing, semantic information in the scene has been shown to play a dominant role in guiding fixations compared to visual salience (e.g., Henderson & Hayes, 2017). However, scene viewing is sometimes disrupted by cognitive processes unrelated to the scene. For example, viewers sometimes engage in mind-wandering, or having thoughts unre...
We suggest that consideration of trial-by-trial variations, individual differences, and training data will enrich the current framework in Luck et al. (2020). We consider whether attentional capture is modulated by trial-by-trial fluctuations of attentional state and experiences on the previous trial. We also consider whether individual differences...
Our ability to maintain focus on a task waxes and wanes. Recent research suggests that eye-tracking may be a useful tool to capture the momentary slips of attention. In this paper, we show that pre-trial gaze stability predicted momentary slips of attention on the upcoming trial. In two visual search tasks, we asked participants to stabilize their...
Recent studies have shown that mind-wandering (MW) is associated with changes in eye movement parameters, but have not explored how MW affects the sequential pattern of eye movements involved in making sense of complex visual information. Eye movements naturally unfold over time and this process may reveal novel information about cognitive processi...
Recent studies have shown that mind-wandering (MW) is associated with changes in eyemovement parameters, but have not explored how MW affects the sequential pattern of eyemovements involved in making sense of complex visual information. Eye movements natu-rally unfold over time and this process may reveal novel information about cognitive process-i...
Mind-wandering (MW) often involves a decoupling between attention and external information (Schooler et al., 2011). The present study examined whether eye movements during MW decouple from image content in a scene perception task. Participants studied real-world scenes and occasionally answered thought probes assessing their attentional states (on-...
Mind-wandering (MW) is ubiquitous and is associated with reduced performance across a wide range of tasks. Recent studies have shown that MW can be related to changes in gaze parameters. In this dissertation, I explored the link between eye movements and MW in three different contexts that involve complex cognitive processing: visual search, scene...
Video lectures are increasingly prevalent, but they present challenges to learners. Students' minds often wander, yet we know little about how mind-wandering affects attention during video lectures. Two studies examined eye movement patterns of mind-wandering during video lectures. In both studies, mind-wandering reports were collected by either se...
Mind-wandering (i.e., thoughts irrelevant to the current task) occurs frequently during reading. The current study examined whether mind-wandering was associated with reduced rereading when the reader read the so-called garden-path jokes. In a garden-path joke, the reader's initial interpretation is violated by the final punchline, and the violatio...
2019, American Psychological Association. This paper is not the copy of record and may not exactly replicate the final, authoritative version of the article. Please do not copy or cite without authors' permission. The final article will be available, upon publication, via its DOI: 10.1037/xlm0000745 Mind-wandering, or thoughts irrelevant to the cur...
In a garden-path joke, the initial semantic set-up is violated by the final punchline (e.g., "My girlfriend has read so many negative things about smoking, therefore she decided to quit reading"). Resolving this incongruity requires cognitive effort. The current study used eye-tracking to show that mind-wandering (both intentional and unintentional...
This chapter provides an overview of the development of three foundational cognitive processes that are relevant for learning in general and for math learning in particular: executive functions, long-term memory, and visuospatial thinking. The chapter begins by reviewing both traditional and state-of-the-art research methods that psychologists use...
The current research looked at how listening to music affects eye movements when college students read natural passages for comprehension. Two studies found that effects of music depend on both frequency of the word and dynamics of the music. Study 1 showed that lexical and linguistic features of the text remained highly robust predictors of lookin...
Questions
Question (1)
Hello! I have used the SMI mobile eye tracking glasses to collect data and used the semantic gaze mapping feature in the BeGaze to map raw fixations. The idea is that you can import a reference image with pre-defined AOIs and map the raw fixations on the video to that reference image in a fixation-by-fixation manner. However, I found that the software skipped some fixations when I was comparing the raw data and the mapped data. Sometimes it skipped a great portion of them. I was just wondering if any one has similar experiences and the rationale behind this "skipping".
Thank you!
