Julie Golomb
Ohio State University, OH·Psychology
The brain cannot process everything at once, so people constantly decide what to pay attention to, both in the world around them and in their own thoughts. Distractions make those decisions harder.
- Fields
Psychology
Neuroscience
- Topics
attention
distraction
visual working memory
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2029
What they work on
- Test whether spatial distractions also disrupt nonspatial filters that control what enters visual working memory, using behavioral experiments, neuromodulation and computational analyses.
- Determine whether disrupting external spatial attention is necessary to cause intrusions into visual working memory, the brain's short-term store for what was just seen.
- Test whether the spread of disruption from external attention to internal memory filters is specific to one sense, and whether people can learn to avoid memory intrusions.
- Examine how abrupt changes in which remembered item is prioritized, a disruption of internal attention, alter the perception and memory of visual features.
More about the research
Because what we attend to shapes what we see and what we remember, a lapse in attention can distort perception and memory. This work asks what happens when attention is disrupted and what that costs for perception, memory and decision making.
Why it matters
Knowing how attention decisions focus or distort perception and memory could help in fast-changing, high-pressure situations where people must decide quickly. The grant notes that this knowledge is needed to build useful tools that aid human decisions in the real world, such as AI-powered smart glasses and other wearable technology. It could also inform artificial intelligence that behaves more like human attention.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Taraz Lee
University of Michigan, MI·Neuroscience
Test whether error-driven adaptation of spatial working memory shares the hallmark features of motor adaptation and uses the same computations as adapting saccades, the quick jumps of the eyes.
Steven Luck
University of California-Davis, CA·Psychology
Test whether distances between population vectors, activity patterns from a neural network model of the brain's object-recognition pathway, predict how well people detect changes in natural scenes and predict ERP activity during the memory delay.
Sara Festini
University of Tampa, FL·Psychology
Test whether words assigned high value after they were studied are recalled faster and more accurately from working memory than low- or negative-value words, using brief computer-based word memory tasks.
The school
Ohio State University: 71 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 882 research doctorates a year.
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