News

Dr. Sean Noah has successfully completed all requirements for the Ph.D. in Psychology. Sean’s research investigated the role of attention in vision. His dissertation titled, “The Neural Mechanisms of Visual Attention”, used electrophysiological recordings and machine learning methods in humans to investigate how the brain focuses attention on high-level objects in the visual world. Congratulations Sean!
Dr. Noah is currently a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley.  

 Travis Powell, who was a Junior Specialist in the Center for Mind and Brain, joined the Psychology Doctoral Program in fall 2020. Travis received his B.S. in Psychology, and B.A. in Linguistics from the University of California, Davis, and will join the Mangun Lab as a student investigating mechanisms of temporal attention. Welcome Travis!

Sean Noah, a second year doctoral student, was awarded a National Eye Institute Traineeship for 2019-2020. He will gain additional training as part of the UC Davis Vision Science Training Program (T32). His research is focused on elucidating neural mechanisms of visual attention, especially related to visual object perception. Congratulations Sean!
 

Dr. Ashley Royston has successfully completed all requirements for her Ph.D. in Psychology. Ashley’s research investigated the role of attention in vision. Her dissertation titled, “Neural Mechanisms of Spatial Attention: Electrophysiological Studies of Attentional Feedback Priming in Human Primary Visual Cortex” used electrophysiological recordings in humans to measure early cortical visual processing as they performed a demanding visual task. Congratulations Ashley!
Dr. Royston is currently a User Research Engineer at Microsoft Corporation.

A new $2.7M, five year grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to Dr. Mangun will support studies of attentional control using simultaneous EEG and fMRI recordings. The work will include advanced signal processing methods and machine learning approaches. The research program partners with the engineering team of Professor Mingzhou Ding at the University of Florida.


     

In 2016, Dr. Mangun presented the Radboud Excellence Lecture in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. The talk, titled, “Attention, Awareness and Free Will: From Synapse to Neural Systems”, provided a theoretic overview of the field of attention research, using examples from research in the lab, including studies using brain imaging, and macroscopic and cellular recordings of brain activity.