Dean of the College and Psychology Program Present
Autism, Attention, and the Temporal Dynamics of Perception
Thursday, November 6, 2014
Preston Theater
A lecture by Michael Grubb, New York University, Shanghai
From moment to moment, the environment inundates our senses with a tremendous amount of information, far more than the brain can process and render for conscious awareness. To efficiently interact with a dynamic world, we have to select for further sensory processing those things in the environment that are most relevant to our short and long term goals, while simultaneously ignoring irrelevant stimuli that compete for access to limited resources. In it’s most general sense, this process of selecting the relevant from the irrelevant can be thought of as attention.
In this talk, I will discuss two lines of research that I have conducted on a specific kind of attention: covert visuospatial attention. This term might sound unfamiliar, but every time you move your mind’s eye to try and get a better glimpse of what’s happening at the table next to your, or you automatically notice that e–mail notification in your web browser, covert spatial attention is at work. I will present data from two sets of studies that examine purported deficits in spatial attention in individuals with autism spectrum disorder, followed by a series of experiments on the interaction of voluntary and involuntary attentional processes in typically developing individuals.
In this talk, I will discuss two lines of research that I have conducted on a specific kind of attention: covert visuospatial attention. This term might sound unfamiliar, but every time you move your mind’s eye to try and get a better glimpse of what’s happening at the table next to your, or you automatically notice that e–mail notification in your web browser, covert spatial attention is at work. I will present data from two sets of studies that examine purported deficits in spatial attention in individuals with autism spectrum disorder, followed by a series of experiments on the interaction of voluntary and involuntary attentional processes in typically developing individuals.
For more information, call 845-758-7621, or e-mail [email protected].
Location: Preston Theater