People
Dr. Polly Dalton
polly.dalton [at] rhul.ac.uk
I am interested in selective attention — the means by which relevant stimuli are processed more thoroughly by the brain than less relevant stimuli. Within this broad area, my research concentrates on several more specific questions, including: the relationship between attention and awareness; attentional capture; and the way that attention acts within and between the sensory modalities of vision, hearing and touch. I have recently begun to investigate attentional allocation during real life tasks, such as the use of in-car navigation systems.
Sandra Murphy
sandra.murphy.2010 [at] rhul.ac.uk
My broad area of interest is selective attention, and in particular the processes determining whether we can successfully attend to relevant information whilst ignoring irrelevant stimuli. My research background has focused upon selective attention in the visual domain. For example, my final year dissertation of my BSc at Goldsmiths investigated the effect of perceptual load on affordance of common graspable objects. Through my PhD, I am now extending my research into the auditory modality. I am particularly planning to investigate whether the principles of the load theory can also apply to hearing.
Nick Fraenkel
nickfraenkel+rhul [at] gmail.com
My background is in perception and movement, and in particular the ways in which different sensory modalities overlap, interact and work together. My MSc research focused on how vision influences hearing in the speech perception phenomenon known as the McGurk effect. Before my masters, as a research assistant at the Perception In Action Labs at Edinburgh University I worked on a number of projects investigating the mechanisms underlying co-ordinated movement in musicians, athletes, swans and microbes. I also have a long-standing interest in the psychology of music – partly because musical activity is an interesting and demanding perceptuo-motor task, but mainly just because I like music.