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Working Memory and Attentional Capture My primary work is on the influence of the contents of working memory on attentional capture. Through this ongoing project, we are investigating how attention moves from one representation to another in working memory, and also how the number of items in working memory affects the extent of attentional capture. |
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Biasing Attention Using fMRI to assess sensory and prefrontal activity, we investigated how irrelevant cues can bias attention toward the wrong task. In our study, we presented visual cues telling paricipants to either listen or look for an upcoming target. Meanwhile, the participants heard irrelevant auditory instructions that were either congruent or incongruent to the visual cue. Subsequently, in both the headphones and on the screen we present targets simultaneously (sometimes congruent and sometimes incongruent.) A cue to attend to one modality elicited increased brain activity in the opposite modality when the cue was accompanied by incongruent distracting information, thus indicating that the attentional control network was disrupted by the auditory distractor word. |
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Memory Mechanisms Another project I'm working on in the Jonides lab along with Marc Berman explores how working memory interference resolution differs for separate kinds of stimuli, including pictures, words, and pseudowords. |
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Music Cognition In one of my first projects in the Jonides lab, our group looked into whether prior musical training has an influence on working memory and other cognitive control tasks. The first phase of this project has been completed, and we are now working on a functional neuroimaging test of subsequent memory for verbal stimuli in trained musicians vs. controls. Franklin, M.S., Rattray, K., Moore, K.S., Moher, J., Yip, C-Y., & Jonides, J. (In press) The Effects of Musical Training on Verbal Memory. Psychology of Music |
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Spatial Strategies In addition to working with Dr. Jonides, I am also working in the Cognitive and Affective Neuropsychology Lab with Patricia Reuter-Lorenz investigating what strategies people use in spatial working memory, and whether these strategies are voluntary or involuntary. We are looking into whether simultaneous or sequential presentation of stimuli generate different strategies for remembering spatial items. |
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