Visual Attention Lab

Department of Surgery, Brigham and Women's Hospital
Director: Jeremy M. Wolfe, PhD

Work in the laboratory can be broken into five major areas:

      Basic Research

  1. Preattentive vision - Studies of the processing of visual stimuli before they are selected by attention for further, more complete analysis.
  2. Attentional deployment - Studies of the mechanisms by which attention selects specific items including studies of how to terminate searches without finding the target.
  3. Post-Attentive vision - Studies of the consequences of attention. Once attention has been deployed to an item and has been removed, what are the persistent effects of that act of attention?

    Clinical and Applied Research

  4. Effect of circadian phase and sleep deprivation on attention - In collaboration with the lab of Dr. Charles Czeisler (Harvard / BWH), as series of studies of the interaction of attention with sleep and circadian factors.
  5. Studies of visual search as they apply to Airport Security and Medical Screening. Our particular interest is in the impact of target prevalence. How does search performance change if targets are very rare (as in screening tasks).

For more information, please visit the Visual Attention Lab website.

Faculty
Administrative Contact Name

Jeremy M. Wolfe, PhD
617-768-8814
64 Sidney Street, Suite 170
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139