Research
Attentional Selection
Humans are able to selectively attend to parts of our environment, specific objects or even simple features, like colors or auditory frequencies. My research interests are the dynamics as well as cortical sources of such attentional deployment. I approach these questions using event-related potentials (ERP), system identification approaches for EEG (VESPA and m-sequence techniques), and human intracranial recordings.
Please see the following publications for details:
Frey, Kelly, Lalor, & Foxe, 2010
Sensory processing in clinical populations
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder exhibit sensory processing skills that exceed those of the normal population in several domains (e.g. attention to fine details), while showing deficits in other domains (e.g. motion processing). My research is aimed at understanding the neural basis of these aspects of sensory processing in autism, with the goal of aiding clinical diagnosis.
Visual Attention in Natural Environments
In natural environments, humans are not able to process all information available to the visual system simultaneously. As a consequence, we attend to different subparts of the input one after the other. What are
the mechanisms and strategies that guide this selection process?
I investigate the influence of image features like color contrast on overt visual attention by recording eye-movements of human subjects. In these experiments the visual stimuli are lifelike due to the use of color-calibrated images and monitors.
Please see the following publications for details:
Frey, Wirz, Willenbockel, Betz, Schreiber, Troscianko, & König, 2011
(and the commentary by Tom Foulsham)
Frey, Honey, & König, 2008
Frey, König, & Einhäuser, 2007