Joseph Chisholm

• PhD
• PostDoc Position at Dalhousie University

An important aspect of embodied approaches to cognition is the idea that human cognition does not occur simply in the brain, but is influenced by a complex bi-directional interplay between the brain, body, and external environment. Though embodied cognition is often studied in a controlled laboratory setting, by its very nature it can arise spontan...

Our attention and memory can be biased toward objects having high self-relevance, such as things we own. Yet in explaining such effects, theorizing has been limited to psychological determinants of self-relevance. Here we examined the contribution physical actions make to this ownership bias. In Experiment 1, participants moved object images on a t...

Research investigating the effects of action video game experience on cognition has demonstrated a host of performance improvements on a variety of basic tasks. Given the prevailing evidence that these benefits result from efficient control of attentional processes, there has been growing interest in using action video games as a general tool to en...

Research has demonstrated that experience with action video games is associated with improvements in a host of cognitive tasks. Evidence from paradigms that assess aspects of attention has suggested that action video game players (AVGPs) possess greater control over the allocation of attentional resources than do non-video-game players (NVGPs). Usi...

Kramer, Hahn, Irwin, and Theeuwes (2000) reported that the interfering effect of distractors is reduced when participants are aware of the to-be-ignored information. In contrast, recent evidence indicates that distractor interference increases when individuals are aware of the distractors. In the present investigation, we directly assessed the infl...

The aim of the present study was to test the cognitive ethology approach, which seeks to link cognitions and behaviours as they operate in everyday life with those studied in controlled lab-based investigations. Our test bed was the understanding of first-person and third-person perspectives, which in lab-based investigations have been defined in a...

Determining how we use our body to support cognition represents an important part of understanding the embodied and embedded nature of cognition. In the present investigation, we pursue this question in the context of a common perceptual task. Specifically, we report a series of experiments investigating head tilt (i.e., external normalization) as...

Teleoperation is the act of controlling an object that exists in a space, real or virtual, physically disconnected from the user. During such situations, it is not uncommon to observe those controlling the remote object exhibiting movement consistent with the behaviour of the remote object. Though this behaviour has no obvious impact on one's contr...

A sizable body of work has accumulated over the past decade highlighting the relationship between action video game experience and benefits in cognitive task performance. Research has been largely consistent in demonstrating that action video game players (AVGPs) outperform non-video game players (NVGPs) especially in tasks that involve selective a...

The emerging literature on embodied cognition highlights the role that the body plays in cognitive and affective processes. We investigated whether different body postures, specifically leaning postures thought to reflect different states of cognitive focus, can impact cognitive focus and task performance. In three experiments we confirmed that dif...

Action video game players (AVGPs) have been demonstrated to outperform non-video-game players(NVGPs) on a range of cognitive tasks. Evidence to date suggests that AVGPs’ enhanced performance in attention based tasks can be accounted for by improved top-down control over the allocation of visuospatial attention. Thus,we propose that AVGPs provide a...

Recent studies indicate that playing video games improves performance on attention tasks by enhancing top-down control over visual attention. However, whether this increase in top-down control can modulate the effects of bottom-up attentional processes is unknown. To examine this issue, video game players and non-video game players performed an att...

Recent studies indicate that playing action video games improves performance on a number of attention-based tasks. However, it remains unclear whether action video game experience primarily affects endogenous or exogenous forms of spatial orienting. To examine this issue, action video game players and non-action video game players performed an atte...