Steven Luck
University of California-Davis, CA·Psychology
Seeing smoothly depends on holding what we just saw in mind for a moment, for example across a blink or an eye movement. This short-term store is called visual working memory, and it is central to perception and to visually guided behavior.
- Fields
Psychology
Neuroscience
Computer Science
- Topics
visual working memory
natural scenes
change detection
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- 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.
- Compare population vectors from different cortical regions, estimated from the network model and from fMRI data, to identify which brain regions support visual working memory for scenes.
- Determine whether the population-vector model predicts performance in visually guided tasks such as visual search, and compare model versions with competing explanations of memory capacity limits for natural and artificial stimuli.
- Extend ERPLAB Toolbox, free Matlab software for analyzing ERP brain-wave data, with more efficient workflows and new multivariate pattern analysis methods.
- Add ERPLAB tools that support reproducible ERP methods and replicable results, and create extensive new training materials for researchers.
More about the research
Many disorders involve impaired visual processing, so understanding this memory, and measuring the brain activity behind it, matters for science and medicine. The research has two parts. One builds computational models of how people remember real-world scenes. The other develops free software for analyzing event-related potentials (ERPs), brain-wave responses recorded from the scalp that track perception and thought with millisecond timing.
Why it matters
A clearer model of how people remember everyday scenes could help in understanding, diagnosing and treating the many disorders that involve impaired visual processing. Free, transparent ERPLAB software lets labs that study healthy people and patients measure brain-wave data more accurately without costly commercial tools. This could speed research into the diagnosis and treatment of brain and mental disorders.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Angela Gutchess
Brandeis University, MA·Psychology
Test whether the self-reference effect, the memory boost from relating information to oneself, differs among non-Hispanic White, second-generation Chinese American and second-generation Mexican American adults.
Julie Golomb
Ohio State University, OH·Psychology
Test whether spatial distractions also disrupt nonspatial filters that control what enters visual working memory, using behavioral experiments, neuromodulation and computational analyses.
Judith Morgan
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Psychology
Test whether coaching depressed mothers to encourage their child's positive emotions, using PCIT-ED modules, increases 4- to 6-year-olds' neural reward response, measured with the RewP and LPP event-related potentials, in a 180-family randomized trial.
The school
University of California-Davis: 49 labs on PI Pages, $1.0B a year on research, 647 research doctorates a year.
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