Duke Visual Cognition Lab

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Lab Director 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 Student 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.
Graduate Student Sarah Donahue B.A. , Smith College 2003	Sarah is in her second 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.
Graduate Student Joseph Harris B.S., B.A., Duke University 2007	Joseph is a first-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).
Lab Manager Melissa Bulkin B.A., University of Maine 2007	Melissa recently graduated from the University of Maine with a B.A. in psychology. She is interested in epigenesis and how perception develops over time. Melissa helps to perform the daily office duties in the lab and coordinates and schedules subjects for ongoing research.
Lab Alumni Greg Stabler B.A. in Psychology, 2007 (Personality/Social Psychology Concentration)	Greg graduated this Spring as a Psychology major with a concentration in personality/social psychology and coursework in perceptual and everyday cognitive psychology. He is interested in the practical aspects of visual perception and its application in the realms of marketing and other business fields. Congratulations to Greg as he's recently joined IBM!
Lab Alumni Jason Arita B.A., UC Berkeley 2005	Jason is the former Lab Manager for the Duke Visual Cognition Lab. He graduated from the University of California at Berkeley where he majored in Cognitive Science with a concentration in Computational Modeling. He is interested in such areas of visual cognition as object-based attention and persistence. Jason is now working in Geoff Woodman's lab at Vanderbilt, where we wish him the very best of luck!
Lab Alumni Ricky Green B.A. in Psychology, 2008 (Neuroscience Concentration)	Ricky has just finished his undergraduate career. This summer he will be in Alaska attending outdoor leadership courses with the International Wilderness Leadership School. Next year he will be teaching English at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey as well as informally continuing his studies in philosophy and psychology while hiking and climbing whenever he can.
Lab Alumni Viktoria Elkis B.S. in Psychology, 2008 (Neuroscience Concentration)	Viktoria recently graduated with a B.S. degree in Psychology and a concentration in Neuroscience. She will be continuing research in cognitive neuroscience next year through the Postbaccalaureate IRTA program at NIH, and plans to apply to medical school.
Lab Alumni Amy Hsu B.S. in Psychology, 2008	Amy recently received her B.S. in Psychology with a concentration in Personality/Social Psychology and a minor in Sociology. She is currently taking a year off to work before she enrolls in law school. We wish her the best of luck!