Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Much of our proposed research seeks to illuminate the key mechanisms or processes that link perception and action, processes subsumed under the rubric of attention. Our main method involves the study of human performance, with emphasis on mental chronometry (the timecourse of mental processing), phenomenology, psychophysics and most recently ERPs and fMRI.  Due to the participation of supervised graduate students, graduate students doing comprehensive projects in my laboratory, honours students and two post-doctoral fellows my research program is diverse, including studies of inhibition of return, eye movements, task switching, visual search, multi-modal orienting, selection & filtering, perceptual & cognitive load, familiarity and novelty, temporal processing.  One fruitful design technique will be the use of hybrid, or dual-task paradigms in which performance on one task (probe) is assessed in different mental states induced by manipulating the task context, usually by varying the nature or demands of another task (primary). We also propose to extend our recent work using individual differences to explore the functional significance of phenomena (like inhibition of return).  Typically the performance of normal adults will be tested.  In addition - usually in collaboration with other scholars - we apply neuropsychological methods in which we examine the performance of patients following specific lesions to the brain or individuals drawn from special populations (developmental dyslexics, children suffering from ADHD and autism.  Converging evidence obtained via neuro-imaging (ERP and fMRI) and other modern neuroscientific methods will also be generated when necessary and feasible. Our research yields fundamental knowledge about the operation of cognitive systems involved in perception, attention and action and is beginning to take aim as how these are implemented in the nervous system.  In addition, we have used our human performance expertise and scientific tools to develop fruitful applied collaborations with the Nova Scotia Gambling Foundation, Nortel and the Bank of Canada, and other Canadian scholars in the field of literacy development through participation in CLLRnet.