The role of attention in early scene processing. Within the first 100 milliseconds of seeing an image, our visual system extracts enough information to recognize the global context of the image, or its gist. Is this extraction of gist relatively automatic or does attention play a role in the process?

Perceptual stability across eye movements.  When we move our eyes, the visual system temporarily suppresses incoming visual information (saccadic suppression). However, we rarely perceive this loss of information as the brain seamlessly integrates the pre-saccade view with the post-saccade view. How does the brain link this information to create a stable perception?

Semantic guidance in scenes. When we move our eyes through a scene, what do we choose to look at? The standard models of attention in scenes emphasize low-level visual saliency (brightness, unique colors and textures, etc.) as a key driver of attention. However, the semantic information available to the viewer plays an extremely important role in how eye movements are deployed through a scene (see Henderson, et al., 2019 for a review). Further, this semantic information interacts with the viewer’s task and prior experiences to influence where they will look.

Working memory and overt attention. How are working memory and saccadic eye movements related? Much work, including my own, suggests that working memory is an important mechanism for controlling when and where the eyes move.