Nicholas Gaspelin , PhD
- Associate Professor Psychological Sciences
Research
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Areas of expertise
- Behavioral Neuroscience
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Computational Neuroscience
Research Summary
Dr. Nicholas Gaspelin studies selective attention using cognitive tasks that measure behavior, eye tracking, and electroencephalograms (EEG).
In daily life, we are often overloaded by multiple competing stimuli and tasks. To function efficiently, we use mechanisms of attention to selectively process the most relevant sensory information and juggle our cognitive processing resources amongst the most important tasks. The research of the Gaspelin’s Attention and Distraction Lab aims to understand the cognitive neuroscience underlying attention in humans. For example, are there certain kinds of salient stimuli that have the automatic power to distract us? What kinds of attentional processes occur while we search complex visual scenes? What are the neural processes that help guide eye movements to relevant information? These topics are studies via experiments using cognitive tasks to measure behavior, eye movements, and event-related potentials (ERPs).