Stefanie Becker

My research focus is broadly in the area of Cognitive Psychology and Neuroscience, and specifically, in attention research. My perhaps most important contribution to date is that I formulated a new relational theory of attention and eye movements (Becker, 2010; JEP-General). Deviating from the most prominent feature-specific theories of attention, my research shows that attention can be tuned in a highly context-dependent manner to objects, to select the reddest, darkest or largest object. There is also a long-standing debate whether attention is controlled by stimulus-driven factors that are outside of of our control or goal-driven factors such as our intentions. My own work shows that we indeed have a large amount of control over visual selective attention, as we can tune attention to sought-after objects which then quickly attract the gaze when they are present. There are however also bottom-up limitations to this goal-driven selection process that can completely frustrate our attempts to find an object.

The findings are relevant, as conscious perception is severely capacity-limited: Attention selects objects for further processing and determines which items we can consciously appraise first. My own relational account has recently been extended to Inattentional Blindness, Awareness and Memory, allowing even more accurate predictions about what items we will consciously perceive first, and which we will miss. This has important implications about how we should design environments to ensure that important signals and signs capture our attention, and prevent that we miss them.