Dr Michael Proulx
Lecturer
- Room: 2.02, Fogg building
- Telephone: +44 (0)20 7882 7484
- Email: m.proulx("at" sign)qmul.ac.uk
Research interests:
Research website: http://webspace.qmul.ac.uk/mproulx/
My research in cognitive psychology focuses on perception and attention. At any given moment more light is entering the retina from all areas of the visual field than a human can process. Attention is the mechanism used to prioritize the processing of relevant or salient information at the expense of momentarily irrelevant information. Blind individuals are at the other end of the visual information processing spectrum. Instead of having an overwhelming richness of input, there is little or no visual perception. Much of my work is on visual search: How does one find a friend in a crowded restaurant? The particular issue that interests me is the relative role of top-down and bottom-up processes in the guidance of attention in visual search: that is, what captures attention and why and how attention is captured. In Düsseldorf I began a new line of work with the blind that attempts to uncover how the "visual" parts of the brain process sensory information in the absence of visual input. Much of this work has used a 'sensory-substitution' device (called ‘The vOICe’) that provides visual information by translating visual input into sound. I now plan to explore the intersection of these two research domains, which provides an interesting opportunity to explore the behavioural and neural mechanisms of "visual" information processing. My interests have expanded from just the visual system to considering how multiple sensory modalities contribute to perception and interact with one another. Psychophysical and behavioural tests are the primary basis of my research and I have recently incorporated EEG/ERP and fMRI methods as well. I work in collaboration with colleagues in the UK, USA, Germany, and The Netherlands.
Research group:
Postgraduate supervision:
Brown, David; d.j.brown ("at" sign) qmul.ac.uk;