Visual Attention Lab

Lab Members | Lab Photos

Wolfe Lab 2019

(Left to right) Wanyi, Danny, Katya (Project Success'19), Jeremy, Farah, Ester, Makaela, Chia-Chien, Leah, Sneha, Sarosh (RSI'19), Devrath (RSI'19), Catlin (RSI'19) & Hsing-Fen
Missing: Bea

Principal Investigator

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  Jeremy Wolfe

  Jeremy Wolfe is the head of the lab. He is Professor of Ophthalmology and Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. Wolfe received an AB in Psychology in 1977 from Princeton and his PhD in Psychology in 1981 from MIT under the supervision of Richard Held. His research focuses on visual search and visual attention with a particular interest in socially important search tasks in areas such as medical image perception (e.g. cancer screening), security (e.g. baggage screening), and intelligence. He taught Intro. Psychology and other courses for 25 years, mostly at MIT. Wolfe is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of AAAS, APA (Div 1, 3, & 6), and APS. He has been President of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (FABBS), President of the Eastern Psychological Association, Chair of the Board of the Psychonomic Society and a member of the Board of the Vision Sciences Society. He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications (CRPI) and was Editor of Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics. Wolfe also serves on the Oversight Committee of the North American Board of the Union for Reform Judaism. He is married to Julie Sandell; Provost of Suffolk University in Boston (Information accurate in March, 2022).
  
  Click HERE for Dr. Wolfe's CV (2021).

Research Fellows

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  Chia-Chien Wu

  Chia-Chien received his Ph.D at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where he worked with Eileen Kowler on the spatial and temporal control of saccadic eye movements. Before joining the Visual Attention Lab, he also worked as a postdoc with Marc Pomplun at University of Massachusetts at Boston and Arash Yazdanbakhsh at Boston University, studying scene perception, semantic guidance of visual attention and the control of eye movements in Parkinson’s disease. As a postdoctoral fellow in the Visual Attention Lab, he is studying change detection and multiple object tracking.

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  Farahnaz Ahmed Wick

  Farahnaz received her Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where she worked with Marc Pomplun. Her dissertation topic was top-down and bottom-up biases in visual attention. As a postdoctoral fellow in Visual Attention Lab, Farahnaz continues investigating attentional mechanisms involved in scene perception, multiple identity tracking and visual working memory.

  Click HERE to see Farahnaz lastest talk at Museum of Science!

Research Assistants

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  Ava Mitra

  Originally from Chittagong, Bangladesh, Ava received her B.S. in Neuroscience from Rhodes College in Memphis, TN. While at Rhodes, she did research in Dr. Jason Haberman's Visual Cognition lab, studying the visual phenomena of ensemble perception. Her research looked at the hierarchical nature of ensemble coding, assessing how memory representations of ensembles change with information decay.

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  Nathan Trinkl

  Nathan received a B.S. in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology and a B.A. in Piano Performance at Emory University. He previously worked with Dr. Daniel Dilks, studying how visual scene regions allow us to both recognize and navigate our environment.

Visiting Professors

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  Beatriz Gil-Gómez de Liaño

  Bea completed her PhD in 2005 at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM) in Experimental Psychology studying attention and working memory interactions. During her Postdoc training she worked with Dr. Carlo Umiltà at Università degli Studi di Padova (2008/2009) studying attention in Traumatic Brain Injury Patients. In 2011 se worked with Dr. Molly Potter at the MIT (José Castillejo Scholarship, Spanish Governement) studying Attention in RSVP tasks, and with Dr. Jeremy Wolfe in 2015 (Fulbright Scholarship), studying working memory effects in visual search. She is also Associate Professor at UAM, teaching Methods in Psychology. From December 2015 to January 2018 she was Vice-Dean of Research and Doctoral Studies at the School of Psychology of the UAM. Now, Bea has been awarded again with a Fulbright Scholarship as Senior Researcher (Salvador de Madariaga) for 6 months, from February to July 2018 in the Wolfe Lab to continue her studies in visual search. She has also been recently awarded with a 3-year Marie Curie Fellowship by the European Research Council, to work in the Adaptive Brain Lab with Dr. Zoe Kourtzi at the University of Cambridge. As a Global Fellowship she will continue joining Wolfe lab for 2 years from August 2018 within a project studying attention and working memory in children. Her main research interest nowadays is to understand how attentional mechanisms operate in a developmental brain, and how they change in typical and atypical development to design new treatments to improve them during childhood.

Visiting Post-Docs

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  Daniel Ernst

  Daniel received his Ph.D. in Psychology at Bielefeld University where he was supervised by Gernot Horstmann. He wrote his dissertation on how stimuli with unexpected features capture visual attention and the gaze. As a postdoc, he focused on how fixation durations vary in the course of visual search trials. In the summer of 2020, Daniel served as the interim chair of the unit for Psychological Methods and Evaluation at Bielefeld University. Afterwards, he joined the Wolfe Lab to investigate what fixation durations reveal about the size of functional visual field and attentional guidance.

Lab Alumni

Former Principal Investigators

Todd Horowitz

Former Post-Doctoral Research Fellows

Iris Wiegand
'17-'18

Yung-Hao Yang
'17-'18

Krista Ehinger
'13-'16

Preeti Sareen
'13-'15

Matthew S. Cain
'13-'14

Maria Nordfang
'13-'14

Trafton Drew
'11-'14

Melissa Le-Hoa Võ
'10-'14

Michelle Greene
'09-'11

Karla Evans
'08-'13

Yair Pinto
'08-'10

Ester Reijnen
'08-'09

Piers Howe
'07-'10

Anina Rich
'05-'07

David Fencsik
'03-'07

Evan Palmer
'03-'07

Melina Kunar
'03-'06

Aude Oliva
'00-'02

Nayantara Santhi
'00-'02

Former Visiting Graduate Students

Former Visiting Professors

Former Visiting Post-Docs

Matthew B. Thompson
'14

Michael Zehetleitner
'09

Former Research Assistants

Former Visiting Undergraduate, and High School Students