Jeremy Wolfe

Jeremy Wolfe is the head of the lab. He is Professor of Ophthalmology and Radiology at Harvard Medical School. In addition, he is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT and an Adjunct Associate Professor in Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University. He received his AB in 1977 from Princeton and his Ph.D. in Psychology from MIT in 1981. He is married to Julie Sandell (Assoc. Provost for Faculty Affairs, Boston U) and has three sons (Ben-26; graduate student at Berkeley with David Whitney), Philip-23, and Simon -16. Click here to read his curriculum vitae.

Todd Horowitz

Todd received his B.Sc. in psychology from Michigan State University in 1990, and his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1995, He is currently Assistant Professor in Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School. Todd's primary research interests are in attention, especially visual search and multiple object tracking, and circadian effects on cognition. Click here to see his CV.

Karla Evans

Karla received her Ph.D. at Princeton University where, under the tutelage of Anne Treisman, she studied natural scene perception and the role of attention in processing complex visual stimuli, as well as crossmodal interaction between correspondent auditory and visual features. For her thesis she used psychophysics, fMRI, and electrophysiology in humans to understand featural correspondence between basic auditory and visual features, exploring the nature, the neural correlates and the role of attention in their interaction. As a postdoctoral fellow in the Visual Attention Lab she is further honing her psychophysical expertise as she now ties to understand the effect of target prevalence in visual search and how deployment of attention determines what is perceived in real scenes. She is particularly interested in understanding how perceptual information within and across senses gets integrated into a unified complex percept of the world. Click here for her C.V..

Melissa Le-Hoa Vo

Melissa received her diploma in cognitive psychology from the Free University Berlin in 2006 investigating the interaction of emotion and cognition in word, sentence, and picture processing. After a few months of backpacking - visiting awesome places like India, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, as well as family in the US - she went back to her hometown Munich, where she started to work on "Attention Allocation in Scene Perception" receiving her Ph.D. from the Ludwig-Maximilians University in 2008. As a postdoctoral research fellow she then went on to join the Visual Cognition Lab at the University of Edinburgh. Together with Prof. John M. Henderson she dived even deeper into the exciting world of eye guidance in scene perception (not without also diving deep into the Scottish water of life!). In the Visual Attention Lab, she will continue to investigate what guides attention and eye movements during search in naturalistic scenes. She is particularly interested in how expectations regarding the composition of a scene influence eye movement control. Click here for her C.V., publications, and some more scenes.

Trafton Drew

Trafton got his PhD working with Ed Vogel at the University of Oregon. Before that, he worked with Ron Mangun and Barry Giesbrecht at UC-Davis, Kimron Shapiro at UW-Bangor, and as an undergrad, Peter Gordon at UNC-Chapel Hill. Trafton studies the relationship between attention and working memory through the use of variety of methodologies including eye-tracking, electrophysiology and psychophysical techniques. His graduate work focused on developing neural measures of the different types of processing that take place during attentive tracking using ERPs (and plotting negative as up, as god intended). As a post-doc, he is using studying ways to improve radiologist performance. This includes monitoring eye-movements of radiologists as they search and studying how observers interpret computer aided detection (CAD) marks during difficult search tasks. He has a very infrequently updated website, where you can see his CV and other random stuff about him.

Sage Boettcher

Sage received her BS in Psychology and BS in Statistics from the University of Delaware. Under the guidance of Jim Hoffman, she completed her senior thesis on the neural component of emotion-induced blindness using event related potentials. Sage joined the lab in June 2012.

Jinxia Zhang

Jinxia is a visiting student in Visual Attention Lab. She joined the lab in October 2012. She is a Ph.D. candidate student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China. Her research interests include visual attention, visual saliency detection, computer vision and machine learning.

Kilian Semmelmann

During his Bachelor of Science in Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrueck, Kilian worked on Autism and Human Social Perception at MIT and sensory integration at UCSD, finishing his degree with a thesis about Adaptive Saliency Maps under the supervison of Peter Koenig. He currently studies Neuro-Cognitive Psychology at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich and is working at the Wolfe Lab on Visual Attention and Foraging Theory since 2012.