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Experimental Psychology Seminar - Marisa Carrasco, New York University
30 January 2024, 1:00 pm–3:00 pm
Professor Marisa Carrasco, New York University joins us to discuss how Voluntary and Involuntary Attention Differentially Shape Perception
Event Information
Open to
- All
Organiser
-
Antonietta Esposito
Venue:
25 Gordon Street , Room 500 - Maths (5th Floor)
Zoom:
https://ucl.zoom.us/j/98052874766?pwd=Umx2RXBMOE0wRE1mUVE5RXNrclp2QT09
Visual attention is essential for visual perception; it enables us to selectively process information across space, visual dimensions, and time. In this talk, I focus on two types of covert spatial attention: Endogenous attention, which is voluntarily deployed and sustained, and exogenous attention, which is involuntarily deployed fast and transiently. I illustrate how these two types of attention differentially modulate visual perception. I highlight findings from: (1) Psychophysical experiments investigating their effects on performance and their corresponding featural representations. (2) An image-computable model, which require separate operating regimes across visual detail (spatial frequency) to explain how they differentially alter visual perception; (3) Neuroimaging (fMRI) experiments differentiating their effects in occipital cortex. (4) Neurostimulation experiments with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) establishing differential causal roles of the occipital cortex (V1/V2) for exogenous attention and of the frontal cortex (right frontal eye-field) for endogenous attention. Together these studies reveal a computational dissociation and a critical role of different brain areas to explain how endogenous and exogenous differentially attention alter the processing of basic visual dimensions and shape perception.
About the Speaker
Marisa Carrasco
Julius Silver Professor of Psychology and Neural Science, Collegiate Professor, at New York University
Marisa is a cognitive neuroscientist who uses human psychophysics, neuroimaging, neurostimulation, and computational modeling to investigate the relation between brain and behavior in visual perception and attention. Her research has revealed how attention modulates perceptual performance and alters appearance in a variety of visual tasks.
She has served as chair of the NYU Psychology Department (2001-2007), as president of the Vision Sciences Society and the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, and as a senior editor of two scientific journals, Vision Research and Journal of Vision. Marisa is a fellow of the American Psychological Society and the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and has received many prestigious honors, including an NSF Young Investigator Award, an American Association of University Women Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Cattell Fellowship, the Davida Teller Award (Vision Sciences Society), and the Andrew Carnegie Prize in Mind and Brain Sciences (Carnegie Mellon University, Neuroscience Institute). She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.