Research Interests
- Attention
- Vision
- Awareness
Research Description
My work is focused on understanding attention, both how it works and how it fails, mostly in the visual domain. I have studied issues such as temporal attention, why we tend to get distracted when we concentrate over long periods of time, how we tune out the world when we are trying to concentrate, and how it is that we find objects in a scene.
Education
Ph.D. from the Pennsylvania State University, 2002
Awards and Honors
CAREER award recipient from National Science Foundation
Additional Campus Affiliations
Professor, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
External Links
Recent Publications
Ng, G. J. P., Buetti, S., Patel, T. N., & Lleras, A. (2021). Prioritization in visual attention does not work the way you think it does. Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance, 47(2), 252-268. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000887
Dolcos, F., Katsumi, Y., Bogdan, P. C., Shen, C., Jun, S., Buetti, S., Lleras, A., Bost, K. F., Weymar, M., & Dolcos, S. (2020). The impact of focused attention on subsequent emotional recollection: A functional MRI investigation. Neuropsychologia, 138, [107338]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2020.107338
Lleras, A., Wang, Z., Ng, G. J. P., Ballew, K., Xu, J., & Buetti, S. (2020). A target contrast signal theory of parallel processing in goal-directed search. Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, 82(2), 394-425. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-019-01928-9
Buetti, S., Xu, J., & Lleras, A. (2019). Predicting how color and shape combine in the human visual system to direct attention. Scientific reports, 9(1), [20258]. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-56238-9
Lleras, A., Wang, Z., Madison, A., & Buetti, S. (2019). Predicting Search Performance in Heterogeneous Scenes: Quantifying the Impact of Homogeneity Effects in Efficient Search. Collabra: Psychology, 5(1), 2. [2]. https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.151