Research Projects

Selective visual-spatial attention in humans gates task-relevant information while excluding irrelevant information regardless of their salience. This ability allows individuals to prioritize a subset of the visual, environmental information for processing by the brain, towards serving the needs of the visually guided task at hand and is also indicative of the individuals' visual working memory. This research proposal asks if external, task-irrelevant emotions (replete in the social environment) interact with internal individual states (e.g., anxiety severities) to rapidly modulate the efficiency of filtering out visual distractors from targets, within a visual snapshot (duration of a saccadic eye movement: ?300?ms), as well as whether the aforesaid effect (if any) is associated with the inter-individual differences in brain structure. The project proposes to use visual psychophysical experiment combined with voxel based morphometry of the human brain.