My research centres on the study of attention and working memory, including how attention and memory operations change as individuals progress from childhood to old age. My research is carried out in two labs: one focused on the study of driving and a second devoted to basic research on attention and working memory. The research carried out in these labs is described below.

Driving Research (DRiVE lab): Thornbrough 1311.

Vehicle collisions are a leading cause of injury and death in Canada. The majority of these collisions are due to human error and my research is devoted to finding ways to reduce the number of collisions. With the collaboration of researchers from Computing Science and Engineering, I use the driving simulator in order to investigate the following issues:

• Driver distraction (cell phone use, texting, mind-wandering, in-vehicle conversations, audiobooks, emotional distraction)
• Autonomous vehicles and new in-vehicle technologies
• Collision risk in teen and novice drivers
• Risk factors in older drivers
• Driving in special populations (ADHD, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Parkinson’s disease)
• Drugs and alcohol and driving
• Simulator adaptation syndrome, (galvanic vestibular stimulation and galvanic cutaneous stimulation)

For more information on the DRIVE lab, either take the following link (DRiVE Lab) or click on DRiVE lab tab on the blue page header bar above.

Visual Attention Lab: Blackwood Hall Room 210

In the visual attention lab I study the basic mechanisms of attention, working memory and reasoning using laboratory tasks.

• Multiple-object tracking: Keeping track of the positions of multiple moving items at once among others, an ability that predicts collision risk in seniors and performance in elite athletes in team sports such as hockey and soccer
• Enumeration (subitizing and counting): Determining how many items there are, an ability that predicts the development of mathematic reasoning in children 
• Reasoning in uncertain occasions:  Reasoning about future events, reasoning about the probability (the Gambler’s fallacy).

For more information on the Visual Attention Lab, click on the following link (Visual Attention lab) the Visual Attention Lab tab on the blue page header bar above.