Our research seeks to understand how the brain interprets and stores information arriving from the senses (e.g. vision or touch), and how this sensory input is used to plan and control action. We conduct tests of attention, memory, and motor control on healthy volunteers, as well as experiments involving people whose normal brain function has been disrupted by a stroke or other brain injury. Our goal is to identify the computational mechanisms underlying sensory control of action, and relate them to the neural processes by which they are implemented in the nervous system.

Recent research in the lab has focused on eye movements and visual memory. Our ability to remember what we have seen is surprisingly limited: we investigate how this limited resource of visual memory is distributed between features of the visual scene and how it is updated when we move our eyes (you can read more about this research here).

In everyday life, we shift our gaze several times per second in order to extract as much information as possible from the world around us: a second focus of our research is to understand the processes that decide where and in what order these eye movements are directed, and how they become disrupted in neurological disease.

While cognitive functions such as attention and memory are often studied from a perceptual viewpoint, they are also critical for our ability to control movement and physically interact with our surroundings. Some of the newest research in our group investigates the role of these sensory functions in the skilled control of arm and hand movements.

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We are currently looking for prospective graduate students and post-docs. Please email if you are interested in joining the lab.