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Lab Director

 

Steve

 

Stephen Mitroff

Ph.D., Harvard 2002
B.A., UC Berkeley 1998

Steve is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience and a core member of Duke University's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. Steve is interested in adult visual cognition, infant cognition, and the relationship between the two. Working with other labs (both at Duke and elsewhere), he is studying how we perceive the world the way we do and in what ways infant perception differs from that of our own.

Graduate Students

 

Mat

 

Mathias Fleck

B.A., University of Chicago 1999

 

Mat is interested in exploring the effects of expertise and context on visual search, with an emphasis on findings that may have immediate social importance. He is currently studying how videogame expertise affects performance on real-world visual tasks (airport luggage screening, mammogram detection) and visual perception more generally. Mat is also exploring the interactions between salience and prevalence on single- and multiple-target searches.

 

 

Sarah

 

Sarah Donahue

B.A. , Smith College 2003

Primary lab affiliation: Woldorff Lab

Sarah is in her third year as a graduate student in the Interdisciplinary Program in Cognitive Neuroscience. She is interested in how information from different sensory systems (visual and auditory) comes together to form complete percepts of objects.

 

jo

 

Joseph Harris

B.S., B.A., Duke University 2007

Primary lab affiliation: Woldorff Lab

Joseph is a second-year IPCN student. He is interested in visual processing that may occur outside of awareness and, more broadly, the disconnect that exists between physical stimuli and our experienced percepts. He is currently working with event-related potentials (ERPs) to elucidate the neural correlates of subliminal face processing. He is also investigating the phenomenon of visual processing during motion-induced blindness (MIB).

 

kait

 

Kait Clark

B.S. Saint Joseph's University 2008

Kait is a first-year grad student in the Interdisciplinary Program in Cognitive Neuroscience. She has a variety of interests within the field of visual perception, including visual working memory, perceptual learning, and change blindness. Currently, she is investigating individual differences in change detection strategies and examining the constraints of object files.

Lab Manager

 

Jordan

 

Jordan Axt

B.A., Duke University 2008

Jordan graduated from Duke University with a double major in Psychology (concentrating in cognitive psychology) and English in December 2008. His future plans include attending graduate school for cognitive psychology and learning how to play the guitar, but for now he is happy to fill in as lab manager. His current research interests involve the role of emotion and morality in cognition, but these are always subject to change.

Research Assistants

 

Portrait_Laura.jpg

 

Laura Sestokas

B.A. in Psychology, 2009

(Neuroscience Concentration)

Laura is a fourth-year undergraduate student majoring in Psychology with an emphasis in Neuroscience. She is interested in exploring the neural underpinnings of visual perception. She also is fascinated by brain mechanisms of individuals with extraordinary perceptual skills (e.g. synesthesia), as well as those of patients who have suffered brain damage.

 

Brittany

 

Brittany James

B.S. in Psychology, 2009

Brittany is a fourth-year Psychology major with a Markets and Management Studies certificate. She is interested in visual processes such as the effect of external pressures on awareness in rare-target searches and the modal and amodal completion phenomena, as well as memory across the lifespan, particularly the creation of false memories.

 

valentina

 

Valentina Jalowski

B.S. in Psychology, 2012

Valentina is a first-year undergraduate student and plans on majoring in Psychology with a concentration in Neuroscience. She is interested in abnormal psychology, as well as how psychologists assess personality variants and behavioral disorders.

 

Natalie

 

Natalie Burtenshaw

B.S. in Psychology, 2011

Natalie is a second-year Psychology major with a concentration in Social Psychology. She loves art and documentary photography and plans to earn a Documentary Studies Certificate. She is on Edens Quad Council and enjoys fulfilling days at the lab with data entry, filing, and coding. In her free time she likes to jump out of planes.