I have recently begun my post-doc fellowship in the Human Communication Lab at UTM, with the Research Group on Cognitive and Sensory Aging.
I am trainee in the CIHR Strategic Training Grant on Communication and Social Interaction in Healthy Aging

Research keywords: Attention: divided and selective; Visual Search; Emotional Stroop; Aging; Cognition; Interaction of visual and audio information.

Research description: PhD Dissertation was dedicated to examine the effect of similarity -- among targets, among distractors, and across targets and distractors -- on visual target detection using the Redundant Target Design (RTD), including the nominal sameness, previously neglected in studies of RTD. Collectively, the results showed that similarity, notably names, must be taken into consideration in studies of RTD, People activated the names of the stimuli and these names affected their detection. A novel hybrid model accounts for all aspects of the data.
Emotional Stroop: The emotional Stroop effect has traditionally been considered as an attention phenomenon. I was involved in several studies indicating that emotional stimuli affect all ongoing activity, and not only activity requiring attention such as color naming. These studies support an explanation of the Emotional Stroop as product of a defense mechanism that responds to threat by temporarily appropriating resources away from the threat-irrelevant attributes.

Research supervisor / mentor: Dr. Bruce Schneider