People must attend to, perceive, and store into memory an enormous amount of visual input on a daily basis. However, the way in which these seemingly simple tasks are accomplished remains somewhat of a mystery. Part of this mystery arises because attention, perception, memory and language are so highly interconnected they are often hard to disentangle. Professor Kahan’s research focuses on the interplay between these cognitive functions. He is conducting research examining: object substitution masking, object trimming, attentional capture, the attentional blink phenomenon, both semantic and repetition priming, negative priming, Stroop interference, and other visual paradigms which may help to clarify the interconnected roles of attention, perception, and memory.
