Welcome to the Visual Memory and Attention Lab at the University of Iowa

We are located within the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

In the lab, we study how vision and memory are used to support intelligent action. Specifically, we study scene perception, working memory, attention, and eye movements, with the goal of understanding how these systems interact to guide behavior.

The lab is closely affiliated with Cathleen Moore's lab. We have several shared projects and students, and we have a common laboratory space in the Psychological and Brain Sciences Building.

Recent Publications:

Ariel just had a paper accepted that examines the memory representations supporting learned attentional biases. She showed that learned biases that have often been thought to depend on implicit forms of memory can, instead, be driven by memory representations that are available for explicit retrieval and report.

Mike had a paper accepted examining how eye movements are oriented to objects in scenes. When determining where to direct gaze in a natural scene, we tend to select task-relevant objects. Here we showed that such object selection takes into account the perceptual structure of the scene, with saccade landing position reflecting the perceptual completion of objects behind occluding surfaces. 

Ariel had a paper accepted examining how natural object categories (e.g., cat, car, table) structure the learning of object statistics to guide attention.