Patricia M. Blough
Professor (Research):
Psychology
Phone:
My research interests have centered around visual information processing at various "levels." For example, I have worked on basic sensory psychophysics, sometimes seeking neural correlates or assessing pharmacological interventions. I have also used this sensory information to ask questions about stimulus control; for example, the elusive behavioral contrast phenomenon is sensitive to stimulus variables. Most recently I have been using the visual search procedure to address more complex aspects of perception.
Interests
My research interests have centered around visual information processing at various "levels." For example, I have worked on basic sensory psychophysics, sometimes seeking neural correlates or assessing pharmacological interventions. I have also used this sensory information to ask questions about stimulus control; for example, the elusive behavioral contrast phenomenon is sensitive to stimulus variables. Most recently I have been using the visual search procedure to address more complex aspects of perception.
Most of my experiments have used pigeons, who make good subjects not only because their visual systems are well understood, but also because their specialized brains and natural environments offer interesting comparative hypotheses. For example, pigeons have excellent color vision, but their retinal color receptors are different from humans'. In nature, pigeons devote considerable time to visual search, and certain models based on foraging birds seem to relate to search models developed by human attentional theorists.
In ongoing research we are asking about factors that modify attention (salient stimuli? expectations?) and about the extent to which focussed attention interferes with the detection of alternative targets. Some of our findings suggest that practice reduces the advantage usually associated with attentional focus.
