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.
I also work in increasing the visibility of under-represented minorities in the cognitive sciences through my work at the Spark Society. Consider joining this society! It is open to all, including allies, who want to help us in this mission.
Education
Ph.D. from the Pennsylvania State University, 2002
Awards and Honors
CAREER award recipient from National Science Foundation
Mid-Career award recipient from the Psychonomic Society
US Delegate to the International Union of Psychological Science
Additional Campus Affiliations
Associate Dean of Inclusive Excellence, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Professor, Psychology
Professor, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
External Links
- List of publications (and reprints)
- Vision Lab Webpage (always under construction)
- Beckman Institute page
- Spark Society
- U.S. National Committee for Psychological Science at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
- Link to our NSF-funded Louis Stokes Alliance For Minority Participation Program!
- I work as the Associate Dean for Inclusive Excellence for the College of LAS. This is our website: https://las.illinois.edu/about/ie
Recent Publications
Bogdan, P. C., Dolcos, S., Federmeier, K. D., Lleras, A., Schwarb, H., & Dolcos, F. (2025). Emotional dissociations in temporal associations: opposing effects of arousal on memory for details surrounding unpleasant events. Cognition and Emotion, 39(1), 82-96. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2023.2270196
Cui, A. Y., Buetti, S., Xu, Z. J., & Lleras, A. (2025). Evaluating the contribution of parallel processing of color and shape in a conjunction search task. Scientific reports, 15(1), Article 7760. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-92453-3
Lleras, A., Xu, Z. J., Tan, H. J. H., Shao, Y., & Buetti, S. (2025). Quantifying the Relationship Between Search Efficiency and Perceptual Similarity in Color Space Across Different Efficient Search Tasks. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 51(7), 850-874. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0001327
Wang, Y., Buetti, S., Cui, A. Y., & Lleras, A. (2025). Color-color feature guidance in visual search. Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-025-03055-0
Bogdan, P. C., Dolcos, S., Buetti, S., Lleras, A., & Dolcos, F. (2024). Investigating the suitability of online eye tracking for psychological research: Evidence from comparisons with in-person data using emotion–attention interaction tasks. Behavior Research Methods, 56(3), 2213-2226. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-023-02143-z