I'm an MA student studying visual attention and distraction in cognitive psychology at Wake Forest University. I expect to defend my thesis in June 2020.

In any setting, the amount of visual information that our eyes take in is far more than our brains are able to process. Whether in a brand new setting, like a previously unvisited country, or one more familiar, like one's own living room, there are always many different objects, people, or other visual stimuli for us to take in. We therefore rely on visual attention to narrow down which inputs are used in further mental processing. In doing so, the brain biases the competition of stimuli according to which inputs are most relevant to our goals or most ‘attention-grabbing.’ I study how the focus of attention is selected.