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 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.

Serap received her undergraduate degree from Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey. After graduating, she worked as a school counselor and realized that counseling is not her calling. After this revelation, she got into Leiden University in Leiden, Holland. She received her MSc in Cognitive Psychology under the supervision of Bernhard Hommel. The strong winds of Holland swept her along the Atlantic and North America to the Emerald City (aka Seattle) where she is still a PhD student with John Palmer at the University of Washington. She studies visual selective attention and tries to understand how selection mechanisms work. Currently, she is a visiting graduate student in the Visual Attention Lab working with Todd Horowitz. She is interested in multiple object tracking, particularly, whether tracking performance is affected by weighted distribution of attention among the tracked objects. When she is not engaged in scientific activities, she reads a lot, blogs in Turkish, cooks, enjoys the coffee she orders from Seattle, and plays with her dog Lupin the wolf.