My Focus

I have spent my first years in the Urgent Choice Lab focusing on the interplay between attentional mechanisms and urgent choices. In particular, the novel design of the lab's tasks allowed us to discern large effects on performance due to stimulus repetition, and to tease apart temporally intricate interactions between the perceptual evaluation and motor planning aspects of a decision.

Thereafter, we designed a new urgent task that pits exogenous and endogenous attentional mechanisms against each other during an ongoing motor choice. Our goal was to characterize the interaction between these two forms of attention at the neural level; that is, to determine how this interaction is manifest within oculomotor planning circuits during saccadic choices.