Attention and Perception Laboratory

Prof. Tsal’s research investigates attention and perception.  A fundamental problem concerning human cognition is that the world presents more information--objects and events--than we can effectively deal with at any given time. To circumvent this information overload, we selectively attend to relevant objects and disregard the irrelevant. Our research examines the factors that determine the focus of attentional selectivity, and also explores the nature of perception outside the focus of attention. We investigate the effects of perceptual load vs. perceptual dilution and assess the time course and the mandatory nature of distractor processing.